A multiplex-multicast scheme that improves system capacity of voice-over-IP on wireless LAN by 100%

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is.an important application on the Internet. With the emergence of WLAN technology and its various advantages compared with the traditional wired LAN, it is fast becoming the "last-mile" of choice for the overall Internet infrastructure. This work considers the support of VoIP over 802.11b WLAN. We show that although the raw WLAN capacity can potentially support more than 500 VoIP sessions, various overheads bring this down to only 12 VoIP sessions when using GSM 6.10 codec. We propose a novel multiplexing scheme for VoIP which exploits multicasting over WLAN for the downlink VoIP traffic. This scheme can achieve nearly 100% improvement in system capacity. In addition, we present results showing that the delay and delay jitter introduced by the proposed scheme are small. We believe that the scheme can reduce the blocking probability of VoIP sessions in an enterprise WLAN significantly.