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

Quality of service differentiation for multimedia delivery in wireless LANs

Delivering multimedia content to heterogeneous devices over a variable networking environment while maintaining high quality levels involves many technical challenges. The research reported in this thesis presents a solution for Quality of Service (QoS)-based service differentiation when delivering multimedia content over the wireless LANs. This thesis has three major contributions outlined below: 1. A Model-based Bandwidth Estimation algorithm (MBE), which estimates the available bandwidth based on novel TCP and UDP throughput models over IEEE 802.11 WLANs. MBE has been modelled, implemented, and tested through simulations and real life testing. In comparison with other bandwidth estimation techniques, MBE shows better performance in terms of error rate, overhead, and loss. 2. An intelligent Prioritized Adaptive Scheme (iPAS), which provides QoS service differentiation for multimedia delivery in wireless networks. iPAS assigns dynamic priorities to various streams and determines their bandwidth share by employing a probabilistic approach-which makes use of stereotypes. The total bandwidth to be allocated is estimated using MBE. The priority level of individual stream is variable and dependent on stream-related characteristics and delivery QoS parameters. iPAS can be deployed seamlessly over the original IEEE 802.11 protocols and can be included in the IEEE 802.21 framework in order to optimize the control signal communication. iPAS has been modelled, implemented, and evaluated via simulations. The results demonstrate that iPAS achieves better performance than the equal channel access mechanism over IEEE 802.11 DCF and a service differentiation scheme on top of IEEE 802.11e EDCA, in terms of fairness, throughput, delay, loss, and estimated PSNR. Additionally, both objective and subjective video quality assessment have been performed using a prototype system. 3. A QoS-based Downlink/Uplink Fairness Scheme, which uses the stereotypes-based structure to balance the QoS parameters (i.e. throughput, delay, and loss) between downlink and uplink VoIP traffic. The proposed scheme has been modelled and tested through simulations. The results show that, in comparison with other downlink/uplink fairness-oriented solutions, the proposed scheme performs better in terms of VoIP capacity and fairness level between downlink and uplink traffic

Priority-Oriented Adaptive Control With QoS Guarantee for Wireless LANs.

In today’s wireless networks there is a great need for QoS, because of the time-bounded voice, audio and video traffic. A new QoS enhanced standard is being standardized by the IEEE 802.11e workgroup. It uses a contention free access mechanism called Hybrid Control Channel Access (HCCA) to guarantee QoS. However, HCCA is not efficient for all types of time-bounded traffic. This work proposes an alternative protocol which could be adapted in HCF (Hybrid Coordination Function). The Priority Oriented Adaptive Control with QoS Guarantee (POAC-QG) is a complete centralized channel access mechanism, it is able to guarantee QoS for all types of multimedia network applications, it enhances the parameterized traffic with priorities, and it supports time division access using slots. Furthermore, it instantly negotiates the quality levels of the traffic streams according to their priorities, supporting multiple streams to the best quality it can achieve. POAC-QG compared to HCCA, provides higher channel utilization, adapts better to the characteristics of the different traffic types, differentiates the traffic streams more efficiently using priorities, and generally exhibits superior performance

An improved medium access control protocol for real-time applications in WLANs and its firmware development

The IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), commonly known as Wi-Fi, has emerged as a popular internet access technology and researchers are continuously working on improvement of the quality of service (QoS) in WLAN by proposing new and efficient schemes. Voice and video over Internet Protocol (VVoIP) applications are becoming very popular in Wi-Fi enabled portable/handheld devices because of recent technological advancements and lower service costs. Different from normal voice and video streaming, these applications demand symmetric throughput for the upstream and downstream. Existing Wi-Fi standards are optimised for generic internet applications and fail to provide symmetric throughput due to traffic bottleneck at access points. Performance analysis and benchmarking is an integral part of WLAN research, and in the majority of the cases, this is done through computer simulation using popular network simulators such as Network Simulator ff 2 (NS-2) or OPNET. While computer simulation is an excellent approach for saving time and money, results generated from computer simulations do not always match practical observations. This is why, for proper assessment of the merits of a proposed system in WLAN, a trial on a practical hardware platform is highly recommended and is often a requirement. In this thesis work, with a view to address the abovementioned challenges for facilitating VoIP and VVoIP services over Wi-Fi, two key contributions are made: i) formulating a suitable medium access control (MAC) protocol to address symmetric traffic scenario and ii) firmware development of this newly devised MAC protocol for real WLAN hardware. The proposed solution shows signifocant improvements over existing standards by supporting higher number of stations with strict QoS criteria. The proposed hardware platform is available off-the-shelf in the market and is a cost effective way of generating and evaluating performance results on a hardware system

An admission control scheme for IEEE 802.11e wireless local area networks

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-84).Recent times has seen a tremendous increase in the deployment and use of 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). These networks are easy to deploy and maintain, while providing reasonably high data rates at a low cost. In the paradigm of Next-Generation-Networks (NGNs), WLANs can be seen as an important access network technology to support IP multimedia services. However a traditional WLAN does not provide Quality of Service (QoS) support since it was originally designed for best effort operation. The IEEE 802. 11e standard was introduced to overcome the lack of QoS support for the legacy IEEE 802 .11 WLANs. It enhances the Media Access Control (MAC) layer operations to incorporate service differentiation. However, there is a need to prevent overloading of wireless channels, since the QoS experienced by traffic flows is degraded with heavily loaded channels. An admission control scheme for IEEE 802.11e WLANs would be the best solution to limit the amount of multimedia traffic so that channel overloading can be prevented. Some of the work in the literature proposes admission control solutions to protect the QoS of real-time traffic for IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA). However, these solutions often under-utilize the resources of the wireless channels. A measurement-aided model-based admission control scheme for IEEE 802.11e EDCA WLANs is proposed to provide reasonable bandwidth guarantees to all existing flows. The admission control scheme makes use of bandwidth estimations that allows the bandwidth guarantees of all the flows that are admitted into the network to be protected. The bandwidth estimations are obtained using a developed analytical model of IEEE 802.11e EDCA channels. The admission control scheme also aims to accept the maximum amount of flows that can be accommodated by the network's resources. Through simulations, the performance of the proposed admission control scheme is evaluated using NS-2. Results show that accurate bandwidth estimations can be obtained when comparing the estimated achievable bandwidth to actual simulated bandwidth. The results also validate that the bandwidth needs of all admitted traffic are always satisfied when the admission control scheme is applied. It was also found that the admission control scheme allows the maximum amount of flows to be admitted into the network, according the network's capacity