Voice over ATM using AAL2 and bit dropping: Performance and call admission control

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) adaptation layer 2 (AAL2) has been designed for efficient transport of voice, fax, and voiceband data (VBD) traffic over an ATM virtual circuit. The protocol helps achieve low latency and high bandwidth efficiency while applying suitable compression methods on voice/VBD/fax calls and silence elimination on voice calls. We analyze the performance and capacity of an ATM multiplexer based on AAL2 adaptation. We assume that embedded adaptive differential pulse code modulation (ADPCM) is used to compress voice, and silence elimination is used to achieve statistical multiplexing gain. The embedded ADPCM coding scheme allows selective dropping of less significant bits of voice during congestion in the ATM/AAL2 multiplexer. We compare the call capacities of voice multiplexers with and without bit dropping (BD), The performance models and results presented here are based on fairly general assumptions and can be used for traffic engineering and call admission control in land-line or wireless ATM systems for a variety of voice/voiceband compression algorithms. A generalized algorithm for call admission control is also described.