VoIP Communications over WLANs : Implementation of a new downlink transmission protocol

Voice over IP (VoIP) is becoming more and more popular every day. The number of VoIP service providers is continuously increasing along with the number of customers they serve. Moreover, the latest generation of smartphones and mobile devices now incorporate VoIP support. This enables users within a wireless local area network (WLAN) cell to exchange VoIP traffic with other peers. This new traffic potentially poses a problem for WLANs, as the WLAN access point could be required to handle a large number of small packets of encoded speech. Since the access to the media can only be made by one node at a time, all of the devices must contend to access it. If there are multiple calls between nodes in the WLAN and nodes in the fixed network, then all of these packets must go to and from the access point. Moreover the access point needs to transmit the downlink traffic for all of these nodes. Because the Access Point has the same probability of getting access to the media as any other node, this can lead to high delays, and limits the maximum number of simultaneous calls to a rather small number, despite the increasing data rates that the WLAN interfaces are capable of.</p>This project implements and evaluates a new solution that consists of aggregating downlink packets at the access point and transmitting a large multicast packet containing a set of voice frames that need to be sent to nodes within the cell. A demultiplexing process at node extracts the appropriate RTP content from the multicast packet and delivers it locally.Report for the course IK2553QC 2012030