One document matched: draft-baker-tsvwg-mlef-concerns-00.txt



Network Working Group                                           F. Baker
Internet-Draft                                                   J. Polk
Expires: May 31, 2004                                      Cisco Systems
                                                           December 2003


                        MLEF Considered Harmful
                   draft-baker-tsvwg-mlef-concerns-00

Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

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   This Internet-Draft will expire on May 31, 2004.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   The Defense Information Systems Agency of the United States
   Department of Defense, with is contractors, has proposed a service
   architecture for military (NATO and related agencies) telephone
   systems. This is called the Assured Service, and is defined in two
   documents: "Architecture for Assured Service Capabilities in Voice
   over IP" and "Requirements for Assured Service Capabilities in Voice
   over IP". Responding to these are four documents: "Reason Header
   Field for the Session Initiation Protocol", "Extending the Session
   Initiation Protocol Reason Header to account for  Preemption Events",
   "Communications Resource Priority for the Session Initiation
   Protocol", and the "Multi-Level Expedited Forwarding Per Hop
   Behavior" (MLEF PHB). MLEF, as currently defined, has serious



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   problems, which this draft seeks to discuss.

Table of Contents

   1.  Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   1.1 Multi-Level Preemption and Precedence  . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   1.2 Multi-Level Expedited Forwarding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   2.  The problem with MLEF  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
   2.1 Codecs are not infinitely resilient to loss  . . . . . . . . .  7
   2.2 Issues with variable rate codecs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
   2.3 Packet loss happens in emergency situations  . . . . . . . . .  8
   2.4 Packet loss happens in tactical situations . . . . . . . . . .  9
   2.5 MLEF induced loss triggers congestive collapse . . . . . . . .  9
   2.6 MLEF gives no preemption feedback notification . . . . . . . . 10
   3.  Recommendation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   4.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
   5.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
   6.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
       References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
       Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
       Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . 18






























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1. Overview

   The Defense Information Systems Agency of the United States
   Department of Defense, with is contractors, has proposed a service
   architecture for military (NATO and related agencies) telephone
   systems. This is called the Assured Service, and is defined in two
   documents: "Architecture for Assured Service Capabilities in Voice
   over IP" [5] and "Requirements for Assured Service Capabilities in
   Voice over IP" [6]. Responding to these are four documents: "Reason
   Header Field for the Session Initiation Protocol" [3], "Extending the
   Session Initiation Protocol Reason Header to account for Preemption
   Events" [2], "Communications Resource Priority for the Session
   Initiation Protocol" [4], and the "Multi-Level Expedited Forwarding
   Per Hop Behavior" [7] (MLEF PHB). MLEF, as currently defined, has
   serious problems, which this draft seeks to discuss.

1.1 Multi-Level Preemption and Precedence

   Before doing so, however, let us discuss the problem that MLEF is
   intended to solve and the architecture of the system. The Assured
   Service is designed as an IP implementation of an existing ITU-T/
   NATO/DoD telephone system architecture known as Multi-Level
   Precedence and Preemption [12][13][14], or MLPP. MLPP is an
   architecture for a prioritized call handling service such that in
   times of emergency in the relevant NATO and DoD commands, the
   relative importance of various kinds of communications is strictly
   defined, allowing higher priority communication at the expense of
   lower priority communications. These priorities, in descending order,
   are:

   Flash Override Override: used by the Commander in Chief, Secretary of
      Defense, and Joint Chiefs of Staff, Commanders of combatant
      commands when declaring the existence of a state of war.

   Flash Override: used by Commander in Chief, Secretary of Defense, and
      Joint Chiefs of Staff, Commanders of combatant commands when
      declaring the existence of a state of war.

   Flash: reserved generally for telephone calls pertaining to command
      and control of military forces essential to defense and
      retaliation, critical intelligence essential to national survival,
      conduct of diplomatic negotiations critical to the arresting or
      limiting of hostilities, dissemination of critical civil alert
      information essential to national survival, continuity of federal
      government functions essential to national survival, fulfillment
      of critical internal security functions essential to national
      survival, or catastrophic events of national or international
      significance.



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   Immediate: reserved generally for telephone calls pertaining to
      situations that gravely affect the security of national and allied
      forces, reconstitution of forces in a post-attack period,
      intelligence essential to national security, conduct of diplomatic
      negotiations to reduce or limit the threat of war, implementation
      of federal government actions essential to national survival,
      situations that gravely affect the internal security of the
      nation, Civil Defense actions, disasters or events of extensive
      seriousness having an immediate and detrimental effect on the
      welfare of the population, or vital information having an
      immediate effect on aircraft, spacecraft, or missile operations.

   Priority: reserved generally for telephone calls requiring
      expeditious action by called parties and/or furnishing essential
      information for the conduct of government operations.

   Routine: designation applied to those official government
      communications that require rapid transmission by telephonic means
      but do not require preferential handling.

   The rule, in MLPP, is that more important calls override less
   important calls. MLPP is built as a proactive system in which callers
   must assign one of the precedence levels listed above at call
   initiation; this precedence level cannot be changed throughout that
   call. If there is end to end capacity to place a call, any call may
   be placed at any time. However, when any trunk (in the circuit world)
   or interface (in an IP world) reaches utilization capacity, a choice
   must be made as to which call continues. The system will seize the
   trunks or bandwidth necessary to place the more important calls in
   preference to less important calls by preempting an existing call (or
   calls) of lower precedence to permit a higher precedence call to be
   placed.

   More than one call might properly be preempted if more trunks or
   bandwidth is necessary for this higher precedence call. A video call
   (perhaps of 384 KBPS, or 6 trunks) is a good example of this
   situation. This is occurs when the called handset is in use (the
   general calls the colonel, who at the time is talking with the
   captain), or may be used to clear a circuit (all circuits are busy,
   but a lower precedence call may be cleared to create room for the
   higher precedence call). When preemption happens, each preempted
   speaker will hear an audible tone indicating they have just been
   preempted. In this example, the colonel and the captain will each
   hear a audible tone indicating s/he must hang up; upon doing so, the
   colonel will receive the incoming call from the general.






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1.2 Multi-Level Expedited Forwarding

   The Differentiated Services Architecture [9] defines a capability for
   systems to identify traffic they originate or qualify using
   Differentiated Services Code Points [8]. These DSCP values trigger
   the application of a policy in the network called a Per Hop Behavior,
   or PHB.

   Multi-Level Expedited Forwarding (MLEF PHB) builds on the Expedited
   Forwarding [11] PHB (EF). Like EF, it posits that sufficient
   bandwidth is present to support the service, and therefore places
   correctly marked traffic into a low jitter queue, with a form of
   traffic policing at the ingress to the network. It differs from EF in
   that it marks VoIP traffic with five separate code points
   corresponding to the various MLPP precedence levels, which are
   presumed to have different loss probabilities comparable to the
   behavior of the Differentiated Services Assured Service [10] (AF).

   The intended effect is to permit a higher precedence call to reduce
   the service level of a lower precedence call by causing it to delay
   and potentially drop packets. It assumes that the loss rate is in
   fact nominal, or that the users of lower precedence calls will simply
   go away when their call quality fades.




























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2. The problem with MLEF

   The problem with MLEF, in a nutshell, is that it implements a
   different service than MLPP, and that service has a very different
   effect. The basic function of MLPP is to cause some number of lower
   precedence calls to be dropped, or not started, so that

   o  higher precedence calls get placed, and

   o  the remaining lower precedence calls stay at good quality.

   MLEF fails to achieve the second function. Instead, MLEF can create a
   situation where all lower precedence calls become unintelligible,
   thus destroying most of the usefulness of the communications system.
   ETSI TIPHON [16] considers a MOS/PESQ score below 3.6 to be "poor"
   and a MOS score below 3.1 to be "bad". The effect of MLEF is to
   disrupt voice quality (reduce MOS/PESQ scores below 3.6 and at times
   below 3.1) on all calls at routine precedence and potentially other
   calls at the Priority or Immediate precedence, causing their users to
   be unable to conduct their business or to do so with great
   difficulty.

   The logical expectation of a military caller, who understands the
   behavior of MLPP, who cannot place a call or whose call is clearly
   preempted is that he or she will do something different and retry
   later. The logical expectation of a caller who experiences degraded
   voice quality is not that they will hang up and go away, however. In
   a time of crisis, the rational expectation is that they will attempt
   to continue using the service, or will hang up and call again fairly
   quickly, since they have no (MLPP-like) audible signal indicating
   that their call was preempted by lack of available bandwidth, and
   since they are operating in a time of adversity. For all lower
   precedence calls, MLEF creates congestive collapse - 100% utilization
   with zero effectiveness of communication for all calls of a certain
   class.

   Within MLEF, there is a belief that congestion occurrences will
   always be brief in time; that it is better to have momentary
   interruptions in service (similar to cell phone service) than out
   right preemption events (where both parties are informed of the event
   audibly). No accounting or analysis has been done to show that
   congestion events in times military emergency will be milliseconds to
   seconds long (analogous to cell phone quality service), verses
   seconds to minutes (or even hours) long. The existence of the MLPP
   service itself argues against this assumption; if congestion was
   routinely momentary, then returning a fast busy and expecting the
   calling party to call again would be sufficient.




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   It is possible that, in an MLEF world, the commander in chief might
   give the order to "launch the fleet", but the fleet be unable to
   place the order to "raise the anchor", as the latter order is given
   by a more junior officer whose call precedence level may be
   disrupted. It is reported that exactly such an occurrence once
   happened in the Swedish Navy, with the result that a ship ordered to
   immediately put to sea took its pier with it. More disastrous results
   are possible, along with attendant loss of lives. This is not an
   academic concern, and he who argues that it is not relevant argues
   with mathematics, not opinion.

2.1 Codecs are not infinitely resilient to loss

   The issue of concern results from the nature of real time traffic and
   the effect of packet loss on known codecs.

   One of the world's most common and well known codecs is G.711; it is
   the codec used in standard circuit switch voice networks throughout
   the PSTN. Numerous studies [15][16][17][18][19] exist depicting the
   effect of traffic loss on G.711 in ATM and IP packet switched
   environments. While they differ in the details of their findings,
   they generally agree that a random packet loss rate on the order of
   1-2% has a serious effect on voice quality, and higher packet loss
   rates essentially place speech beyond comprehension by the human
   listener. ETSI TIPHON [16] states that "the packet loss rate of 5%
   seems to be almost the quality threshold (low boundary) of the
   ''poor' QoS class", which is to say the boundary between "poor, where
   most users find it disruptive, and "bad", where all users find it
   disruptive.

   The resilience of G.729A and the Internet Low Bit Rate Codec [1]
   (ILBC) have also been studied [20]. G.729A is another common VoIP
   codec, which provides a lower amount of generated bandwidth and has
   better resilience than G.711. ILBC generates a bandwidth between
   G.729A and G.711, but includes with that traffic a variable quantity
   of forward error correction data, which can be used in lossy
   environments to further improve voice quality in the presence of
   loss. However, like G.711, these codecs also have limits on their
   resilience. In the presence of 15% loss, the ILBC reportedly loses
   enough voice quality that it can be difficult to understand what it
   said.

2.2 Issues with variable rate codecs

   G.729A and ILBC are examples of codexs which increase their
   throughput to carry forward error correction data when they are
   experiencing loss, a behavior referred to as "protection coding".
   This behavior - increasing offered load in situations where offered



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   load may be triggering the problem - has an additional characteristic
   that will interact poorly with MLEF. Understand that this is not a
   criticism of the codecs per se; as far as we know, the codecs are
   fine codecs. But this characteristic has a serious side-effect.

   ILBC generates on the order of 31.2 KBPS of traffic under normal
   situations. However, in response to RTCP reports of a high level of
   loss, it increases its Forward Error Correction, expanding the
   bandwidth of the packets to meet acceptable voice quality to the
   receiving end. This expanding bandwidth feature of iLBC is the result
   of piggybacking additional copies of what it calls critical voice
   samples in other packets of other voice samples (this is how the
   bandwidth increases - the effective payload for a series of packets
   increases by a factor of 2). ILBC with protection will increase its
   bandwidth requirements from the no protection rate of 31.2 KBPS to
   35.6 KBPS in times of a packet loss rate of 26%. ILBC further
   increases its bandwidth requirement to 45.6 KBPS (to raise a PESQ-MOS
   value from 2.38 to 3.0) in times where 30% of packets are lost.

   Thus, in any situation where a codec using protection coding
   experiences difficulty due to lack of available bandwidth in an MLEF
   service discipline, it can be expected to compound the difficulty.

2.3 Packet loss happens in emergency situations

   While MLEF protects flows for highest priority calls, it worsens the
   quality of service for all others.

   Telephone systems are generally provisioned with enough bandwidth for
   10% or less of their customers or potential users to simultaneously
   place calls. In a small office with 250 persons in it, this means
   that the ISDN access to the PSTN is often a single T-1 line, and for
   larger offices a corresponding level of bandwidth is generally
   available. If an Internet connection is enough bandwidth for 20 VoIP
   sessions, the simultaneous placement of 20 calls represents a 100%
   load that should be carried with at most nominal loss, but 21 calls
   represents a ~5% overload, and ~5% data loss may be expected to be
   distributed evenly over all calls; in other words, each call may be
   expected to experience 5% loss. Thus, in such a case, the placement
   of a single call may be the difference between 20 routine calls
   operating normally and 21 calls operating with a seriously degraded
   MOS score. In larger installations, corresponding ratios apply. In a
   network which protects some calls from loss, there is no magic: the
   total loss will be the same, and will be concentrated on those calls
   least protected.

   In emergency situations, especially in command and control centers
   such as the US Pentagon, a situation where the center is under attack



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   or where the command is given to go to war can easily result in a
   high percentage of the senior staff needing to place such calls.
   Under such cases, even calls at the "Priority" or "Immediate"
   precedence level would be adversely affected.

2.4 Packet loss happens in tactical situations

   MLEF is being considered in tactical deployments such as WIN-T, and
   faces the same kinds of concerns. In radio environments, and in
   mobile networks, a certain level of loss is normal. However, due to
   the heavy demands of encryption, bandwidth is usually limited. Any
   tactical situation which would place a large number of soldiers on
   the telephone simultaneously can be expected to result in congestive
   loss.

2.5 MLEF induced loss triggers congestive collapse

   The fundamental effect of non-negligible loss of traffic in a
   precedence class, therefore, is the disruption of all calls in that
   precedence class, especially if protection-based codecs are in use.
   This is, definitively, congestive collapse - 100% utilization with
   zero effectiveness of communication for all calls of a certain class.

   When a call experiences congestion when MLEF is in use, the iLBC
   codec (taking one example analyzed in [20]) will start replicating
   voice samples to include in other RTP payload packets (increasing the
   bandwidth required for just that one call. This will further congest
   the network, causing iLBC to add more voice samples to other RTP
   payloads in other packets, further congesting the network. If a
   substantial number of calls in the same MLPP precedence level are
   performing this same codec protection function, the network bandwidth
   grows exponentially within that MLPP precedence level. This will
   cause, as mentioned before, all calling parties within a MLPP level
   to experience packet loss, disrupting or destroying the ability to
   communicate, with no preemption indication to anyone party. Existing
   behavior would be to hang up and try again (because MLPP domain
   personnel are trained to recognize a preemption event and know that
   the system is experiencing congestion due to some emergency. There is
   no such indication, so it is reasonable to conclude that some or most
   calling parties will merely hang up and try again. The problem at
   this point is that MLEF does not (and cannot) provide feedback to
   application layer multimedia signaling protocols to inform those
   protocols that a new call attempt is not such a good idea; nor will
   there be anything to prevent a new call from being set up to the
   previous party (provided there is enough bandwidth available for
   signaling packets within the network through some mechanism such as
   CBWFQ. With the new call set up, and the network too congested to
   transmit enough media packets end-to-end, no calls within that MLPP



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   level will function properly, and no one will receive the proper
   feedback as to what is occurring.

2.6 MLEF gives no preemption feedback notification

   One attribute of the current MLPP service is that when a user's call
   is preempted, the user is told, via an audible signal, of the event.
   In such a case, the user can be expected to find other tasks for a
   period of time and try again later. However, that is not a typical
   human response - especially the response of a human in an agitated
   state of mind - in response to a noisy connection. The more typical
   response is to hope that the circuit will improve as others vacate
   their calls, or to hang up and call again in an attempt to "get
   another circuit". As such, the MLEF PHB fails to signal to the user
   that sufficient bandwidth is simply not available to support his
   call, so that the user can be expected to respond to the situation in
   a different way. There are three ways this can fail:

   o  If a call is placed when there is insufficient bandwidth, the
      system does not give definitive feedback,

   o  If another call is started which consumes bandwidth, the bandwidth
      for this call is reduced, but there is no signal indicating that

   o  If policy is changed during a call, resulting in the necessity to
      drop one or more calls, there is no signal.

   A measurement-based counterpart to the MLPP procedure has been
   proposed, in which calls experiencing significant loss treat this as
   a signal from the network and drop the call. But if all calls at a
   precedence level are experiencing loss, many and perhaps all calls at
   the precedence level would be dropped by this heuristic; if many
   calls are vying for service, the effect would be rolling call
   disruption - a set of calls would be established, additional calls
   would be established disrupting that class of calls, many of the
   disrupted calls would drop, and then more of the competing calls
   would be established - only to be disrupted when the first set
   redialed.













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3. Recommendation

   Considering the nature of real-time traffic and the effect of packet
   loss on known codecs, it is clear that degradation of voice quality
   in an MLEF environment for lower precedence calls will be severe.
   Even the advances in codec technology do not fix the problem.

   With all due respect to the engineers who have worked on designing
   and developing the DISA Assured Service and MLEF, the authors cannot
   in good conscience recommend its deployment as it stands. It will
   protect the calls placed by senior officers and constitutional
   officials, but it does not provide the same service that MLPP
   provides to those who respond to their orders, and therefore
   seriously impinges on the likelihood that those orders will be
   correctly disseminated and carried out. Considering the environment
   this proposed mechanism is for, the potential attractiveness for
   other environments, and that the effects could and should compound
   upon themselves, the worst case scenario includes loss of life due to
   communications failure. Nothing done here should enhance this
   possibility.































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4. IANA Considerations

   IANA is not called upon to do anything with this document.

   If this document is published as an RFC, the RFC Editor should remove
   this section during the process of publication.













































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5. Security Considerations

   This document exposes a problem, but it proposes neither a protocol
   nor a procedure. As such, it does not directly affect the security of
   the Internet.














































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6. Acknowledgements

   This document was developed with the knowledge and input of many
   people, far too numerous to be mentioned by name. Key contributors of
   thoughts include, however, Francois Le Faucheur, Haluk Keskiner, Mike
   Tibodeau, Pete Babendreier, Rohan Mahy, Scott Bradner, Scott
   Morrison, and Subha Dhesikan.












































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References

   [1]   Andersen, S., "Internet Low Bit Rate Codec",
         draft-ietf-avt-ilbc-codec-03 (work in progress), October 2003.

   [2]   Polk, J., "Extending the Session Initiation Protocol Reason
         Header to account for  Preemption Events",
         draft-polk-sipping-reason-header-for-preemption-00 (work in
         progress), October 2003.

   [3]   Oran, D., Schulzrinne, H. and G. Camarillo, "The Reason Header
         Field for the Session Initiation Protocol",
         draft-ietf-sip-reason-01 (work in progress), May 2002.

   [4]   Schulzrinne, H. and J. Polk, "Communications Resource Priority
         for the Session Initiation Protocol  (SIP)",
         draft-ietf-sip-resource-priority-01 (work in progress), July
         2003.

   [5]   Pierce, M. and D. Choi, "Architecture for Assured Service
         Capabilities in Voice over IP",
         draft-pierce-ieprep-assured-service-arch-01 (work in progress),
         June 2003.

   [6]   Pierce, M. and D. Choi, "Requirements for Assured Service
         Capabilities in Voice over IP",
         draft-pierce-ieprep-assured-service-req-01 (work in progress),
         June 2003.

   [7]   Silverman, S., "Multi-Level Expedited Forwarding Per Hop
         Behavior (MLEF PHB)", draft-silverman-diffserv-mlefphb-02 (work
         in progress), July 2003.

   [8]   Nichols, K., Blake, S., Baker, F. and D. Black, "Definition of
         the Differentiated Services Field (DS Field) in the IPv4 and
         IPv6 Headers", RFC 2474, December 1998.

   [9]   Blake, S., Black, D., Carlson, M., Davies, E., Wang, Z. and W.
         Weiss, "An Architecture for Differentiated Services", RFC 2475,
         December 1998.

   [10]  Heinanen, J., Baker, F., Weiss, W. and J. Wroclawski, "Assured
         Forwarding PHB Group", RFC 2597, June 1999.

   [11]  Davie, B., Charny, A., Bennet, J., Benson, K., Le Boudec, J.,
         Courtney, W., Davari, S., Firoiu, V. and D. Stiliadis, "An
         Expedited Forwarding PHB (Per-Hop Behavior)", RFC 3246, March
         2002.



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   [12]  International Telecommunications Union, "Multilevel Precedence
         and Preemption Service (MLPP)", ITU-T Recommendation I.255.3,
         1990.

   [13]  American National Standards Institute, "Telecommunications -
         Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) - Multi-Level
         Precedence and Preemption (MLPP) Service Capability", ANSI
         T1.619-1992 (R1999), 1992.

   [14]  American National Standards Institute, "MLPP Service Domain
         Cause Value Changes", ANSI ANSI T1.619a-1994 (R1999), 1990.

   [15]  Viola Networks, "Netally VoIP Evaluator", January 2003, <http:/
         /www.sygnusdata.co.uk/white_papers/viola/
         netally_voip_sample_report_preliminary.pdf>.

   [16]  ETSI Tiphon, "ETSI Tiphon Temporary Document 64", July 1999,
         <http://docbox.etsi.org/tiphon/tiphon/archives/1999/
         05-9907-Amsterdam/14TD113.pdf>.

   [17]  Nortel Networks, "Packet Loss and Packet Loss Concealment",
         2000, <http://www.nortelnetworks.com/products/01/succession/es/
         collateral/tb_pktloss.pdf>.

   [18]  Clark, A., "Modeling the Effects of Burt Packet Loss and
         Recency on Subjective Voice Quality", 2000, <http://
         www.telchemy.com/references/tech_papers/iptel2001.pdf>.

   [19]  Cisco Systems, "Understanding Codecs: Complexity, Hardware
         Support, MOS, and Negotiation", 2003, <http://www.cisco.com/en/
         US/tech/tk652/tk701/
         technologies_tech_note09186a00800b6710.shtml#mos>.

   [20]  Chen, M. and M. Murthi, "On The Performance Of ILBC Over
         Networks With Bursty Packet Loss", July 2003.


Authors' Addresses

   Fred Baker
   Cisco Systems
   1121 Via Del Rey
   Santa Barbara, California  93117
   USA

   Phone: +1-408-526-4257
   Fax:   +1-413-473-2403
   EMail: fred@cisco.com



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   James Polk
   Cisco Systems
   2200 East President George Bush Turnpike
   Richardson, Texas  75082
   USA

   Phone: +1-469-255-5208
   EMail: jmpolk@cisco.com











































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Intellectual Property Statement

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   HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
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Acknowledgment

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