Voice performance study on single radio multihop IEEE 802.11b systems with chain topology

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is gradually gaining ground in the wireless industry. It is well known on extending the coverage area without providing backhaul on each access router (AR) as compared to the traditional access point (AP). Data or voice traffic is relayed by AR to the gateway which interconnecting wired and wireless network. WMN is a multihop network fundamentally. In order to provide basic understanding of voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) performance, experiment are carried out on the single radio, off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11b Wi-Fi mesh product arranged in a chain topology. Performance of different codecs such as G.711, G.723 and G.729 are firstly compared. Further evaluations are carried out especially on G.729. The result provides the estimation on the number of user can be supported on single radio WMN over number of hop. In realistic implement scenario, the result provides useful information to determine the practical maximum hops number before a backhaul is needed.