Capacity analysis of combined IPTV and VoIP over IEEE 802.11n

Abstract

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) have gained unprecedented growth rates in the past few years. Data rate and high coverage area of IEEE 802.11n motivate the concept of combined IPTV and VoIP over IEEE 802.11n. Transmission of combined IPTV and VoIP over a wireless network is a challenging task. In this paper, we deal with the capacity evaluation of combined IPTV and VoIP over IEEE 802.11n. We evaluate the use of Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) at transport layer of IPTV and VoIP. Our study shows that DCCP can enhance capacity of IPTV by 25%. Our study confirms that performance of DCCP deteriorates severely in presence of any other UDP flow because of congestion-less mechanism of UDP. Our fairness analysis with TCP traffic shows that IPTV and VoIP using DCCP provides fair share in bandwidth to TCP with 19% increase in combined capacity. We study the effect of IEEE 802.11n parameters and obtain optimal values. We show the optimal values and trends of Access Point (AP) parameters including Queue size, Transmission Opportunity, Aggregation and Block ACK etc. Our study shows that nearly 9 more VoIP users are supported with a queue size of 70 packets and transmission opportunity of 9. Our study concludes that selection of DCCP and optimized parameters over IEEE 802.11n can enhance the capacity of IPTV and VoIP by atleast 25% and 19% respectively as compared to the use of UDP.