Capacity Increase for Voice over IP Traffic through Packet Aggregation in Wireless Mesh Networks

Recently, Voice over IP (VoIP) has become an important service for the future internet. However, for ubiquitous wireless VoIP services, greater coverage will be necessary as promised by the advent of e.g. 802.11 WLAN based wireless meshed networks. Unfortunately, the transmission of small (voice) packets imposes high overhead which leads to low capacity for VoIP over 802.11 based multihop meshed networks. In this work, we present a novel packet aggregation mechanism that significantly enhances capacity of VoIP in wireless meshed networks while still maintaining satisfactory voice quality. Extensive experiments using network simulation ns-2 confirm that our packet aggregation algorithm can lead to a significantly increase in the number of supported concurrent VoIP flows over a variety of different hop numbers while reducing the MAC layer contention.