De-Jitter Delay

Because speech is a constant bit-rate service, the jitter from all the variable delays must be
removed before the signal leaves the network. In Cisco router/gateways this is accomplished with
a de-jitter (Δn) buffer at the far-end (receiving) router/gateway. The de-jitter buffer transforms the
variable delay into a fixed delay. It holds the first sample received for a period of time before it
plays it out. This holding period is known as the initial play out delay.
Figure : De-Jitter Buffer Operation

It is essential to handle properly the de-jitter buffer . If samples are held for too short a time,
variations in delay can potentially cause the buffer to under-run and cause gaps in the speech. If
the sample is held for too long a time, the buffer can overrun, and the dropped packets again
cause gaps in the speech. Lastly, if packets are held for too long a time, the overall delay on the
connection can rise to unacceptable levels.
The optimum initial play out delay for the de-jitter buffer is equal to the total variable delay along
the connection. This is shown in Figure above.
Note: The de-jitter buffers can be adaptive, but the maximum delay is fixed. When adaptive
buffers are configured, the delay becomes a variable figure. However, the maximum delay can be
used as a worst case for design purposes.

Figure : Variable Delay and the De-Jitter Buffer

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The initial playout delay is configurable. The maximum depth of the buffer before it overflows is
normally set to 1.5 or 2.0 times this value.
If the 40 ms nominal delay setting is used, the first voice sample received when the de-jitter buffer
is empty is held for 40 ms before it is played out. This implies that a subsequent packet received
from the network can be as much as 40 ms delayed (with respect to the first packet) without any
loss of voice continuity. If it is delayed more than 40 ms, the de-jitter buffer empties and the next
packet received is held for 40 ms before play out to reset the buffer. This results in a gap in the
voice played out for about 40 ms.
The actual contribution of de-jitter buffer to delay is the initial play out delay of the de-jitter buffer
plus the actual amount the first packet was buffered in the network. The worst case is twice the
de-jitter buffer initial delay (assumption is that the first packet through the network experienced
only minimum buffering delay). In practice, over a number of network switch hops, it is probably
not necessary to assume the worst case. The calculations in the examples in the remainder of
this document increase the initial play out delay by a factor of 1.5 to allow for this effect.
Note: In the receiving router/gateway there is delay through the decompression function.
However, this is taken into account by lumping it together with the compression processing delay
as discussed previously.

DELAY CALCULATIONS

The transmission delay is the amount of time used to transmit (push) all of the packets bits from the

queue and into the link. To calculate the delay, the following formula is used: , where L is the
length of the packet (in bits), while R is the transmission speed of the Ethernet link in Mbps
(Megabits per second).

As the packet does not magically appear straight away on router B after it has been pushed into the
link from router A, there is of course a propagation delay. This is the time required to propagate
from the beginning of the link and to router B. The speed of the propagation heavily depends on the
physical medium of the link (fibre optics, twisted pair, copper wire, etc). This delay can be calculated

by the formula: , where d is the distance between router A and router B, and s is the
propagation speed between the two routers. The speed is usually in the range 2 · 108 meter/sec to 3 ·
108 meter/sec, which basically is around the speed of light.
How fast data can be passed through the network media is the throughput of media.

The instantaneous throughput at any instant of time is the rate (in bits/sec) at which Host B is
receiving the file.

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The average throughput of the file is bits/sec, where the file consists of F bits and the transfer
time is T (in seconds).

in packet-switched networks - the first bits in a packet can arrive at a router while many of the
remaining bits in the packet are still waiting to be transmitted by the preceding router.

If we let dproc, dqueue, dtrans and dprop denote the processing, queuing, transmission and propagation
delays, then the total nodal delay is given by

dnodal = dproc + dqueue + dtrans + dprop .

The contribution of these delay components can vary significantly. For example, dprop can be
negligible (e.g., a couple of microseconds) for a link connecting two routers on the same university
campus; however, dprop is hundreds of milliseconds for two routers interconnected by a geostationary
satellite link, and can be the dominant term in dnodal. Similarly, dtrans can be range from negligible to
significant. Its contribution is typically negligible for transmission rates of 10 Mbps and higher (e.g.,
for LANs); however, it can be hundreds of milliseconds for large Internet packets sent over 28.8 kbps
modem links. The processing delay, dproc , is often negligible; however, it strongly influences a
router's maximum throughput, which is the maximum rate at which a router can forward packets.

The nodal delays accumulate and give an end-to-end delay,

dendend = Q (dproc + dtrans + dprop) ,

where once again dtrans = L/R, where L is the packet size. We leave it to the reader to generalize this
formula to the case of heterogeneous delays at the nodes and to the presence of an average queuing
delay at each node.

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