Telecommunications is converging on the use of IP based networks. Due to the low cost of VoIP applications, they are being increasingly used instead of conventional telephony services. IEEE802.11 WLANs are already widely used both commercially and domestically. VoIP applications will also expand from usage over wired networks to voice communications over IEEE802.11 WLANs. This is known as VoWLAN. The use of VoWLAN may reach the maximum capacity of a wireless channel if there are many simultaneous VoIP calls operating close to each other. There is much published research based on a single IEEE802.11 infrastructure WLAN concluding that packet loss, transmission efficiency and latency issues are the major challenges limiting the VoWLAN capacity. The VoIP service quality will drop sharply when the demands exceed the WLAN’s capacity. This thesis demonstrates that these challenges also apply to distributed WLANs. To extend these findings from the existing research, the analysis in this thesis indicates that the capacity of a single IEEE802.11 WLAN channel is 12 VoIP calls. When the number of simultaneous VoIP calls is within the capacity, the WLAN can deliver more than 90% of the voice packets to the receiver within 150 ms (the lowest network performance for supporting acceptable VoIP service). However, as soon as the traffic loads are beyond the wireless channel capacity e.g. the number of simultaneous VoIP calls is greater than 13, the VoIP service quality catastrophically collapses. When the capacity is exceeded there are almost no voice packets that can be delivered to the receiver within 150 ms. Our research results indicate that the delay accumulation for voice packets in the transmitter’s outgoing buffer causes this problem. Our research also found that dropping ‘stale’ voice packets that are already late for delivery to the receiver can give more transmission opportunities to those voice packets that may still be delivered in time. This thesis presents a new strategy called Active Cleaning Queue (ACQ) which actively drops ‘stale’ voice packets from the outgoing buffer and prevents the accumulation of delay in congested conditions. When ACQ is applied in a saturated wireless channel the network performance for supporting VoIP traffic was found to gradually decrease proportional to the numbers of simultaneous VoIP calls rather than catastrophically collapse. There is also published research suggesting that the aggregation of packets can improve the efficiency of WLAN transmissions. An algorithm called Small Packet Aggregation for Wireless Networks (SPAWN) is also presented in this thesis to improve transmission efficiency of small voice packets in WLANs without introducing further delay to VoIP traffic. The evaluation result shows that after applying the SPAWN algorithm, the VoIP capacity of a single wireless channel can be extended up to 24 simultaneous calls.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:606982 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Liu, Zuo |
| Contributors | Filer, Nicholas |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/supporting-voip-in-ieee80211-distributed-wlans(1a6225c3-770e-4ce1-8fbb-b1e3f05534d2).html |
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