Gateway Strategies for VoIP Traffic over Wireless Multihop Networks

Abstract

When supporting both voice and TCP in a wireless multihop network, there are two conflicting goals: to protect the VoIP traffic, and to completely utilize the remaining capacity for TCP. We investigate the interaction between these two popular categories of traffic and find that conventional solution approaches, such as enhanced TCP variants, priority queues, bandwidth limitation, and traffic shaping do not always achieve the goals. TCP and VoIP traffic do not easily coexist because of TCP aggressiveness and data burstiness, and the (self-) interference nature of multihop traffic. We found that enhanced TCP variants fail to coexist with VoIP in the wireless multihop scenarios. Surprisingly, even priority schemes, including those built into the MAC such as RTS/CTS or 802.11e generally cannot protect voice, as they do not account for the interference outside communication range. We present VAGP (Voice Adaptive Gateway Pacer) - an adaptive bandwidth control algorithm at the access gateway that dynamically paces wired-to-wireless TCP data flows based on VoIP traffic status. VAGP continuously monitors the quality of VoIP flows at the gateway and controls the bandwidth used by TCP flows before entering the wireless multihop. To also maintain utilization and TCP performance, VAGP employs TCP specific mechanisms that suppress certain retransmissions across the wireless multihop. Compared to previous proposals for improving TCP over wireless multihop, we show that VAGP retains the end-to-end semantics of TCP, does not require modifications of endpoints, and works in a variety of conditions: different TCP variants, multiple flows, and internet delays, different patterns of interference, different multihop topologies, and different traffic patterns.