Effect of fading on the Performance of VOIP in IEEE 802.11 a WLANs

Author

Awoniyi, Olufunmilola ; Tobagi, Fouad A.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., Stanford Univ., CA, USA

Volume

6

fYear

2004

fDate

20-24 June 2004

Firstpage

3712

Abstract

We investigate the quality of voice communication over IEEE 802.11a WLANs taking realistic channel models into account. We show that the assessment of VoIP performance is overly optimistic if fading is ignored when compared with systems where fading is taken into account. Via simulation, we derive the distribution of VoIP performance (in terms of mean opinion score-MOS) for all the data rates specified in the IEEE 802.11a standard and a range of typical signal-to-noise ratio values. We use a measure for assessing VoIP performance that includes a target level of user-satisfaction and a bound on the probability of not achieving this target. The impact of retransmissions and channel estimation errors on VoIP performance is also discussed.

Keywords

IEEE standards; Internet telephony; channel estimation; fading channels; voice communication; wireless LAN; IEEE 802.11a WLAN; IEEE 802.11a standard; VOIP performance; channel estimation error; data rate; fading effect; mean opinion score; quality of voice communication; signal-to-noise ratio; voice retransmission; Electronic mail; Fading; Internet telephony; Land mobile radio cellular systems; Performance loss; Physical layer; Shadow mapping; Signal to noise ratio; Telecommunication standards; Wireless LAN;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Communications, 2004 IEEE International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8533-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICC.2004.1313235

Filename

1313235