The Outbound Voice Traffic Reduction Scheme in the Push - To - Talk Environment

The push-to-talk technology provides a walkie-talkie like service for group communication. In this paper, we propose an efficient outbound voice traffic reduction scheme in the push-to-talk environment when network congestion happens. The Open Mobile Alliancepush-to-talk over cellular (OMA PoC) architecture, the standard for this kind of group communication, is used as a base network in this paper.The PoC server plays an important role in copying and forwarding of received RTP media packets and the outbound voice traffic of this PoC Server tends to be affected by other traffic when network congestion happens. We extend the functionality of the Controlling PoC Server to accommodate the location information of PoC Clients by co-operating the location management server, which also communicates with the location reporting and packet forwarding agent node. By minimizing the outbound voice traffic of the PoC server, we improve the overall performance in terms of the end-to-end quality which is derived from the E-model. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing PoC scheme when network congestion happens.