Enhancing Voice over WLAN via Rate Adaptation and Retry Scheduling

Today, voice over IP (VoIP) service is emerging as a popular and important application in wireless local area networks (WLANs). While rate adaptation (or link adaptation) has been identified as a key factor determining the performance of WLANs, we have observed that most (if not all) rate adaptation algorithms have been developed to improve the throughput of data traffic, not the quality of service (QoS) of VoIP traffic. Accordingly, in this paper, we investigate the characteristics of VoIP traffic and the limitations of state-of-the-art rate adaptation algorithms, and then enhance the QoS of voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) by ameliorating the existing rate adaptation algorithms. Specifically, we design fast decrease to control the transmission rate of retransmissions, and retry scheduling to avoid the deep fading of the wireless channel as well as hidden terminal interference. We comparatively evaluate the QoS of the revised rate adaptation algorithms via ns-3 simulations and MadWiFi implementations in various communication environments, and demonstrate that the proposed schemes improve the R-score performance by up to 80 percent depending on the network scenarios.