A New Admission Control Metric for VoIP Traffic in 802 . 11 Networks

In this paper, we propose a new metric for admission control of VoIP traffic for IEEE 802.11b networks. Due to the large fixed overhead in IEEE 802.11b, the bandwidth available at the payload sizes typical for VoIP traffic is far less than the bandwidth available when using the network for data traffic. Hence, bandwidth is inappropriate as criterion whether or not a new VoIP stream or data stream can be accommodated without pushing the network over its throughput limit. We propose a new criterion called network utilization characteristic which allows to assess the available resources in the wireless network in an accurate way and show how it can be used for admission control.