Multi-stream voice over IP using packet path diversity

We propose multi-stream transmission of real-time voice over best-effort packet networks such as today’s Internet, where multiple redundant descriptions of the voice stream are sent over independent network paths. At the receiver, multi-stream adaptive playout scheduling is employed to improve the tradeoff among delay, late loss rate, and speech quality. Experiments over the Internet suggest largely uncorrelated statistical characteristics, such as erasure probability and delay jitter, for different network paths, which leads to a noticeable path diversity gain. We have obtained significant reductions in mean end-to-end latency and loss rates compared to FEC protected single-path transmission at the same data rate. The speech quality perceived by the receiver is evaluated using the recently standardized objective quality measure PESQ. In our experiments, we observe gains of more than 0.4 PESQ score for voice transmission with packet path diversity.