End-to-end network performance measurement for voice transmission feasibility

It is well known that the global Internet is growing into the ubiquitous communications medium for everything. As a consequence, Internet traffic is notoriously dynamic, and unpredictable. Unfortunately, the Internet was designed for scalability and robustness, not for sophisticated traffic monitoring. This paper introduces a performance measurement method based on widely used IP protocol elements. which allows measurement, of network performance criteria to predict the voice transmission feasibility of a given local area network. The measurement does neither depend on special VoIP equipment, nor does it need network monitoring hardware. Rather it uses special payload samples to detect unloaded network conditions to receive reference values. These samples are followed by typical VoIP application payload to obtain real-world measurement conditions.