Performance of VoIP in a 802.11 Wireless Mesh Network

Abstract

Performance in multihop wireless networks is known to degrade with the number of hops for both TCP and UDP traffic. For VoIP, the wireless network presents additional challenges as the perceived quality is dependent on both loss and delay. We investigate several methods to improve voice quality and present experimental results from an 802.11b testbed optimized for voice delivery. Use of multiple interfaces, path diversity and aggregation are shown to provide a combined improvement of 13 times in number of calls supported in our 15 node 802.11 mesh system. VoIP, multihop, mesh