Enhancing jitter buffer performance through radio level feedback

Abstract

A jitter buffer in a Voice over LTE receiver may be influenced by radio level feedback (RLF) from both local and remote endpoints to preemptively adjust the jitter buffer delay in anticipation of predicted future losses that have a high probability of occurring. The radio events of the RLF and the scenarios that trigger the preemptive adjustments may be identified, and their use may be expressed in terms of mathematical formulas. Previously, the instantaneous jitter was derived from a weighted history of the media stream, and consequently only packets that had already been received were used to compute the instantaneous jitter to adjust the length of the buffer. By providing and using RLF from both local and remote endpoints, the anticipated delay—for packets that have not yet arrived—may be used to preemptively adjust the buffer, thereby minimizing packet loss without introducing unnecessary delay.