Voice over Wireless LAN and analysis of MiniSIP as an 802.11 Phone

and Section 6-8: Together ii Abstract Voice over IP over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN) is getting great attention from the industry and the products for VoWLAN deployment are emerging rapidly. Although technologies for carrying voice in IP networks have been advancing for years, carrying voice over wireless networks introduces new challenges. For end users, the performance of VoWLAN phones (802.11 phones) are of great importance. The purpose of this document is to discuss the general issues in Voice over WLAN and to compare the features and functions of the 802.11 phones available in the market today. Reasons causing the degradation in performance of 802.11 phones have also been discussed briefly. To understand these issues, tests were conducted to use MiniSIP (A SIP based soft phone developed at KTH and provide enhanced security features based on MIKEY and SRTP) as an 802.11 phone and the analysis of the results of the testing is described in detail towards the end of the paper. Acknowledgement We would like to express our sincere appreciation here to: Professor G. Q. Maguire Jr., who guided us throughout the effort and gave us very useful ideas from time to time. Johan Bilien, who contributed so much time in helping us with MiniSIP compilation and other difficulties we encountered with Linux. The many People in TS Lab, who kindly provided us with the equipment we needed and cared about our progress.