Provisioning Call Quality and Capacity for Femtocells over Wireless Mesh Backhaul

International audienceThe primary contribution of this paper is the design of a novel architecture and mechanisms to enable voice services to be deployed over femtocells backhauled using a wireless mesh network. The architecture combines three mechanisms designed to improve Voice Over IP (VoIP) call quality and capacity in a deployment comprised of meshed-femtocells backhauled over a WiFi-based Wireless Mesh Network (WMN), or femto-over-mesh. The three mechanisms are: (i) a Call Admission Control (CAC) mechanism employed to protect the network against congestion; (ii) the frame aggregation feature of the 802.11e protocol which allows multiple smaller frames to be aggregated into a single larger frame; and (iii) a novel delay-piggy-backing mechanism with two key benefits: prioritizing delayed packets over less delayed packets, and enabling the measurement of voice call quality at intermediate network nodes rather than just at the path end-points. The results show that the combination of the three mechanisms improves the system capacity for high quality voice calls while preventing the network from accepting calls which would result in call quality degradation across all calls, and while maximizing the call capacity available with a given set of network resources