Evaluation of Deficit Round Robin Queue Discipline for Real-time Traffic Management in an RTP/RTCP Environment

Multimedia real-time traffic is deemed to be dominant in future communication systems. One of the reference applications to support real-time traffic is the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), which can be used to transmit multimedia contents on real-time basis. At the same time, Real-time Transmission Control Protocol (RTCP) is used for receiving feedback and getting information about the network. This paper proposes and evaluates a traffic management implementation in such an RTP/RTCP environment for congestion control. Deficit Round Robin queue discipline is used as the traffic management strategy instead of Random Early Detection and Drop Tail queue disciplines. A simulation campaign was performed to analyze the effects of implemented traffic strategies in RTP/RTCP environment and compare it with previous solutions. The obtained results highlight a significant difference in terms of jitter delay and packet losses and improvement the bandwidth utilization for real-time flows. Thus, we are able to provide quantitative evidence of the importance of the queue discipline to efficiently manage multimedia content.