nit of data from source to destination. The delay includes packetization, propagation, queuing, and synchronization (Tanenbaum, 2003). Packetization itself does not create significant delay, but waiting for the packet to fill with the coded information does (Peterson & Davie, 2000). Propagation delays are generally predictable for a given path and depend only on distance. Queuing delays at the buffers of network elements are difficult to quantify because there are variations caused by the dif- fering link capacities, scheduling mechanisms, and current levels of network congestion (Schulzrinne et al., 1996). At the receiver, packets might have become reordered, and it might be necessary to wait for late arrivals; these have to be synchronized before playout can occur. Jitter is the variation in delay between consecutive packets. It is a result of packets taking different paths across the network and variable queues at network elements, which combine to cause the interarrival times to vary. This means that packets might arrive out of order, and the decoder will need to buffer a number of frames to overcome these difficulties. Real- time multimedia applications have strict requirements in terms of maximum delay and delay variation (jitter). The delay and jitter must be kept within the tolerances of human perception. The end-to-end delay requirement varies from one application to another; for example, real-time interactive applications involving video and audio have a one-way delay limit of 100 to 150 ms (Baldi & Ofek, 2000). Synchronization between audio and video to maintain lip sync dictates variations of below 80 ms for one-way communication (Baldi & Ofek, 2000). One of the most common effects of delay in real-time traffic is when a packet arrives too late to be of use to the application. The application has the constraint that it must play the video in a timely fashion, SO even though a packet does eventually arrive, it is ignored/ discarded by the decoder; it might as well not have been sent at all. Some applic