Self-Configuring Multi-hop Ad-Hoc Wireless Telephony for Small Enterprises

In this paper, the authors motivate the interesting characteristics of small-to-medium enterprises and study the problem of wireless IP telephony for such deployments. While small enterprises are characterized by few network nodes and small deployment areas, they also demand good IP telephony quality, ease of deployment, and low management and configuration overhead. The authors evaluate the feasibility of peer-to-peer telephony over a multi-hop wireless ad-hoc network for such small enterprises. The authors designed a system and built a prototype using off-the-shelf components. In this paper, the authors describe the implementation and deployment of this system. Several fundamental routing protocol issues needed to be resolved to develop a stable system and the authors present them here. The authors also report the results of a simulation study they conducted to establish the configuration and performance parameters for such systems, and identify the limits to the use of multi-hop ad-hoc wireless for peer-to-peer IP telephony for small enterprises.