Quality of VoIP in WiMAX and UMTS

Abstract

The deployment of the Next Generation Wireless Networks (NGWNs) has posed great challenges due to the demanding requirements to integrate different radio access technologies and to provide high Quality of Service (QoS) for applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic. To meet the demand of providing high-quality of VoIP at anytime and from anywhere, it is imperative to design suitable models to map QoS between different radio networks. In this paper we investigate the QoS performance of WiMAX and UMTS for supporting VoIP applications since UMTS and WiMAX are emerging as the promising technologies for building the NGWNs. We designed simulation modules in OPNET for both WiMAX andUMTS, and carried out extensive simulations to evaluate and analyze several important performance metrics such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS), end-to-end delay, jitter and packet delay variation. Simulation results show that WiMAX outscores UMTS with a sufficient margin, and provides better support to VoIP applications compared with UMTS.