VoIP Call Admission Control in WLANs in Presence of Elastic Traffic

VoIP service over WLAN networks is a promising alternative to provide mobile voice communications. However, several performance problems appear due to i) heavy protocol overheads, ii) unfairness and asymmetry between the uplink and downlink flows, and iii) the coexistence with other traffic flows. This paper addresses the performance of VoIP communications with simultaneous presence of bidirectional TCP traffic, and shows how the presence of elastic flows drastically reduces the capacity of the system. To solve this limitation a simple solution is proposed using an adaptive Admission and Rate Control algorithm which tunes the BEB (Binary Exponential Backoff) parameters. Analytical results are obtained by using an IEEE 802.11e user centric queuing model based on a bulk service M=G[1;B]=1=K queue, which is able to capture the main dynamics of the EDCA-based traffic differentiation parameters (AIFS, BEB and TXOP). The results show that the improvement achieved by our scheme on the overall VoIP performance is significant

Towards the Quality of Service for VoIP traffic in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

The usage of voice over IP (VoIP) traffic in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks is expected to increase in the near future due to widely deployed 802.11 wireless networks and VoIP services on fixed lines. However, the quality of service (QoS) of VoIP traffic in wireless networks is still unsatisfactory. In this thesis, I identify several sources for the QoS problems of VoIP traffic in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks and propose solutions for these problems. The QoS problems discussed can be divided into three categories, namely, user mobility, VoIP capacity, and call admission control. User mobility causes network disruptions during handoffs. In order to reduce the handoff time between Access Points (APs), I propose a new handoff algorithm, Selective Scanning and Caching, which finds available APs by scanning a minimum number of channels and furthermore allows clients to perform handoffs without scanning, by caching AP information. I also describe a new architecture for the client and server side for seamless IP layer handoffs, which are caused when mobile clients change the subnet due to layer 2 handoffs. I also present two methods to improve VoIP capacity for 802.11 networks, Adaptive Priority Control (APC) and Dynamic Point Coordination Function (DPCF). APC is a new packet scheduling algorithm at the AP and improves the capacity by balancing the uplink and downlink delay of VoIP traffic, and DPCF uses a polling based protocol and minimizes the bandwidth wasted from unnecessary polling, using a dynamic polling list. Additionally, I estimated the capacity for VoIP traffic in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks via theoretical analysis, simulations, and experiments in a wireless test-bed and show how to avoid mistakes in the measurements and comparisons. Finally, to protect the QoS for existing VoIP calls while maximizing the channel utilization, I propose a novel admission control algorithm called QP-CAT (Queue size Prediction using Computation of Additional Transmission), which accurately predicts the impact of new voice calls by virtually transmitting virtual new VoIP traffic

A network resource availability model for IEEE802.11a/b-based WLAN carrying different service types

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jwcn.eurasipjournals.com/content/2011/1/103. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Operators of integrated wireless systems need to have knowledge of the resource availability in their different access networks to perform efficient admission control and maintain good quality of experience to users. Network availability depends on the access technology and the service types. Resource availability in a WLAN is complex to gather when UDP and TCP services co-exist. Previous study on IEEE802.11a/b derived the achievable throughput under the assumption of inelastic and uniformly distributed traffic. Further study investigated TCP connections and derived a model to calculate the effective transmission rate of packets under the assumption of saturated traffic flows. The assumptions are too stringent; therefore, we developed a model for evaluating WLAN resource availability that tries to narrow the gap to more realistic scenarios. It provides an indication of WLAN resource availability for admitting UDP/TCP requests. This article presents the assumptions, the mathematical formulations, and the effectiveness of our model

A Novel Voice Priority Queue (VPQ) Schedule and Algorithm for VoIP over WLAN Network

The VoIP deployment on Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), which is based on IEEE 802.11 standards, is increasing. Currently, many schedulers have been introduced such as Weighted Fair Queueing (WFQ), Strict Priority (SP) General processor sharing (GPS), Deficit Round Robin (DRR), and Contention-Aware Temporally fair Scheduling (CATS). Unfortunately, the current scheduling techniques have some drawbacks on real-time applications and therefore will not be able to handle the VoIP packets in a proper way. The objective of this research is to propose a new scheduler system model for the VoIP application named final stage of Voice Priority Queue (VPQ) scheduler. The scheduler system model is to ensure efficiency by producing a higher throughput and fairness for VoIP packets. In this paper, only the final Stage of the VPQ packet scheduler and its algorithm are presented. Simulation topologies for VoIP traffic were implemented and analyzed using the Network Simulator (NS-2). The results show that this method can achieve a better and more accurate VoIP quality throughput and fairness index over WLANs

Achievable bandwidth estimation for stations in multi-rate IEEE 802.11 WLAN cells

This paper analyzes the effect of multi-rate transmissions in a CSMA wireless LAN environment. Observations in a real testbed showed that bandwidth resources (in Bytes/s) are shared fairly among all stations even though transmissions carried out at lower rates capture the medium for longer periods, which drastically reduces the overall throughput. The intrinsic concept of fairness in a CSMA scheme with multiple rates is quantified by means of a new formulation which is validated through simulations and practical measurements. The algorithm presented provides the maximum achievable bandwidth that can be offered to a given IEEE 802.11 station. Having this information has evident applications in realtime multimedia transmissions over WLANs. The algorithm was also run in commercial APs as a proof of concept, after analyzing its implementation issues