Performance monitoring of VoIP flows for large network operations

The monitoring of performance in VoIP traffic has become vital because users generally expect VoIP service quality that is as high as that of PSTN services. A lightweight method of processing by extracting VoIP flows from Internet traffics is proposed in this paper. Estimating delay variations and the packet loss ratio using knowledge about specific features and the characteristics of VoIP flows, i.e., the inter-packet gap (IPG) which is constant in VoIP flows, is also proposed. Simulation with actual traffic trace is used to evaluate the method, and this revealed that delay variations (IPG variance) can be accurately estimated by monitoring only a few percentage of all flows. The proposed method can be used as a first-alert tool to monitor large amounts of flows to detect signs of degradation in VoIP flows. The method can be used by ISPs to estimate whether VoIP flow performance is adequate within their networks and at ingress from other ISPS.