Improving VoIP over Synchronized WLANs

WiFi-enabled mobile handheld devices are being increasingly used for Voice over IP (VoIP) as well as supporting conventional data applications such as email, file transfer and web access. Wireless LANs (WLANs) are thus increasingly required to support Quality of Service (QoS)-centric applications, which are delay sensitive and require a certain level of throughput. While 802.11e goes some way towards meeting this need, severe congestion leading to unacceptable delays and packet loss can still occur. In the existing 802.11e standard, all VoIP sessions contend within the same prioritization Access Category (AC), despite potentially having very different, and varying one-way (M2E - Mouth to Ear) delays. In this paper we provide a detailed analysis on simulations that demonstrate how VoIP endpoints that are time synchronized can help optimize 802.11e EDCA in order to prioritize VoIP sessions that have relatively large M2E delays and thus distinguish between VoIP sessions. Using the NS-3 Network Simulator, we quantify the benefits achievable through synchronization of an 802.11e network handling multiple VoIP calls in the presence of other TCP traffic. We present a heuristic EDCA tuning algorithm which uses the ITU-T E-Model R-Factor QoS planning tool as the basis of control.