Providing QoS for Symmetrical Voice/Video Traffic in Wireless Networks

Voice over IP (VoIP) and voice-video over IP (VIoIP) are becoming very popular and widespread. These types of real-time services produce streams that are almost symmetrical in nature. A new token passing media access control (MAC) developed by our group, called wireless token network (WTN), has been designed with QoS guarantees in mind. We have previously shown in our previous paper (2006) that WTN supports a higher number of VoIP clients compared to 802.11e due to its higher channel efficiency. In this paper we show that WTN also provides superior QoS for bidirectional streams such as VIoIP due to a higher proportion of channel access given to the access point (AP). Performance results are generated by benchmarking WTN against IEEE 802.11 DCF, IEEE 802.11e EDCA and SpectraLink SVP MAC protocols. These results show that whilst appropriate for unidirectional traffic, these current popular solutions do not provide QoS for streams in both directions, due to design constraints which treat the access point as a single client node.

[1]  C.-C. Jay Kuo,et al.  Quality of service for internet multimedia , 2003 .

[2]  Qian Zhang,et al.  Distributed MAC adaptation for WLAN QoS differentiation , 2003, GLOBECOM '03. IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37489).

[3]  Xiang Chen,et al.  A QoS-enabled MAC architecture for prioritized service in IEEE 802.11 WLANs , 2003, GLOBECOM '03. IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37489).

[4]  Liqiang Zhao,et al.  Enhancement of QoS differentiation over IEEE 802.11 WLAN , 2004, IEEE Communications Letters.

[5]  Sunghyun Choi,et al.  Analysis of IEEE 802.11e for QoS support in wireless LANs , 2003, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[6]  Yang Xiao.  Enhanced DCF of IEEE 802.11e to support QoS , 2003, 2003 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking, 2003. WCNC 2003..

[7]  Thierry Turletti,et al.  A survey of QoS enhancements for IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN , 2004, Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput..

[8]  D. Habibi,et al.  WTN - Providing QoS for VoIP in 802.11 Networks , 2006, TENCON 2006 - 2006 IEEE Region 10 Conference.

[9]  Sujata Banerjee,et al.  Distributed mechanisms for quality of service in wireless LANs , 2003, IEEE Wirel. Commun..

[10]  Mark A. Miller.  Voice Over IP Technologies: Building the Converged Network , 2002 .

[11]  Gennaro Boggia,et al.  A control theoretic approach for supporting quality of service in IEEE 802.11e WLANs with HCF , 2003, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475).