The Effect of the Buffer Size in QoS for Multimedia and Bursty Traffic: When an Upgrade Becomes a Downgrade

This work presents an analysis of the buffer features of an access router, especially the size, the impact on delay and the packet loss rate. In particular, we study how these features can affect the Quality of Service (QoS) of multimedia applications when generating traffic bursts in local networks. First, we show how in a typical SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) network in which several multimedia flows (VoIP, videoconferencing and video surveillance) share access, the upgrade of the bandwidth of the internal network may cause the appearance of a significant amount of packet loss caused by buffer overflow. Secondly, the study shows that the bursty nature of the traffic in some applications traffic (video surveillance) may impair their QoS and that of other services (VoIP and videoconferencing), especially when a certain number of bursts overlap. Various tests have been developed with the aim of characterizing the problems that may appear when network capacity is increased in these scenarios. In some cases, especially when applications generating bursty traffic are present, increasing the network speed may lead to a deterioration in the quality. It has been found that the cause of this quality degradation is buffer overflow, which depends on the bandwidth relationship between the access and the internal networks. Besides, it has been necessary to describe the packet loss distribution by means of a histogram since, although most of the communications present good QoS results, a few of them have worse outcomes. Finally, in order to complete the study we present the MOS results for VoIP calculated from the delay and packet loss rate.