VoIP over Multiple IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

IEEE 802.11 WLAN has high data rate (e.g., 11Mbps for 802.11b and 54Mbps for 802.11g) while voice stream of VoIP has low data rate requirement (e.g., 29.2Kbps). One may therefore expect WLAN to be able to support a large number of VoIP sessions (e.g., 200 and 900 sessions in 802.11b and 802.11g, respectively). Prior work by one of the authors, however, indicated that 802.11 is extremely inefficient for VoIP transport. Only 12 and 60 VoIP sessions can be supported in an 802.11b and an 802.11g WLAN, respectively. This paper shows that the bad news does not stop there. When there are multiple WLANs in the vicinity of each other – a common situation these days – the already-low VoIP capacity can be further eroded in a significant manner. For example, in a 5-by-5, 25-cell multi-WLAN network, the VoIP capacities for 802.11b and 802.11g are only 1.63 and 10.34 sessions per AP, respectively. This paper investigates several solutions to improve the VoIP capacity. Based on a conflict graph model, we propose a clique-analytical call-admission scheme, which increases the VoIP capacity by 52% from 1.63 to 2.48 sessions per AP in 802.11b. For 11g, the call-admission scheme can also increase the capacity by 37%, from 10.34 to 14.14 sessions per AP. If all the three orthogonal frequency channels available in 11b and 11g are used to reduce interferences among adjacent WLANs, clique-analytical call admission can boost the capacity to 7.39 VoIP sessions per AP in 11b and to 44.91 sessions per AP in 11g. Last but not least, this paper expounds for the first time the use of coarse-grained time-division multiple access (CoTDMA) in conjunction with the basic 802.11 CSMA to eliminate the performance-degrading exposed-node and hidden-node problems in 802.11. A 2-layer coloring problem (which is distinct from the classical graph coloring problem) is formulated to assign coarse time slots and frequency channels to VoIP sessions, taking into account the intricacies of the carrier-sensing operation of 802.11. We find that CoTDMA can further increase the VoIP capacity in the multiWLAN scenario by an additional 35% to 10 and 58 sessions per AP in 802.11b and 802.11g, respectively.