Exploiting cooperative behaviors for VoIP communication nodes in a wireless local area network

The purpose of this project was to implement a new design for VoIP communication in a wireless local area. One of the main goals was to experiment with a new approach that exploits cooperative behaviors. By cooperative we mean that the nodes try to cooperate so as to achieve higher cell capacity. VoIP communications has such specific data flows that it is interesting to build protocols that exploit these characteristics, for example for speech these characteristics are: regularity and timeconstrained delivery. Furthermore the wireless local area network brings another dimension in terms of all of the nodes sharing a wireless cell, as the nodes will share a common bandwidthlimited media. In the current standard for wireless local area networks the computers in the cell have to contend to get access to the shared media which can lead to delays, even if the bandwidth needed is much lower than the bandwidth available. If we focus on the needs of VoIP, one way to improve this is for all nodes to cooperate by organizing themselves to efficiently share the media. If they can agree with each other on what time each node will transmit, then they don't need to contend anymore. Thus the VoIP packets can reach their destination on time and while minimizing the use of resources in this cell. In this project we have designed and test a proof of concept of this cooperation in order to prove that it can work and to show what effects and performance it implies. This work can also be seen more generally as contextawareness research where the contextawareness is used to provide input to the cooperative behavior.1F1421 Project report, results presentedhttp://www.ict.kth.se/info/GRU/Events/Old-Seminars/2007/20070115-14.00:CCS-project-presentation.htmlQC 20120327