VoIPiggy: Implementation and evaluation of a mechanism to boost voice capacity in 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

This work is at: The 31st Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM 2012), took place March 25-30, 2012 in Orlando, Florida, USA.Supporting voice traffic in existing WLANs results extremely inefficient, given the large overheads of the protocol operation and the need to prioritize this traffic over, e.g., bulky transfers. In this paper we propose a simple scheme to improve the efficiency of WLANs when voice traffic is present. The mechanism is based on piggybacking voice frames over the acknowledgments, which reduces both frame overheads and time spent in contentions. We evaluate its performance in a large-scale testbed consisting on 33 commercial off-the-shelf devices. The experimental results show dramatic performance improvements in both voice-only and mixed voice-and-data scenarios.The research leading to these results was funded by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2009-5) under grant agreement n.257263 (FLAVIA) and by the the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TEC2010- 10440-E. It was supported in part by the MEDIANET Project (grant S2009/TIC-1468) from the General Directorate of Universities and Research of the Regional Government of Madrid.Publicad