Unified call admission control in corporate domains

Abstract

Call Admission Control is a central mechanism for assurance of quality of service in telephony. While CAC is integrated into Public Switched Telephony Network (PSTN), its application to voice over IP in a corporate environment is challenging not only due to the heterogeneity of technologies, but also because of the difficulty of implementation into commercial VoIP terminals or Access Points.We present a novel framework that unifies call admission control for VoIP telephony corporate users despite their access network (i.e., WiFi or Ethernet) under a single corporate management domain. Our Unified CAC (U-CAC) system can be implemented in a VoIP Gateway/Proxy and uses only standard protocols already present in commercial off-the-shelf devices, avoiding the need to modify the firmware of existing APs or VoIP terminals. We define two variants of the decision algorithm: basic and advanced. In the basic mode of operation, the admission of new calls is based on the availability of spare circuits and the impact of the new call in the speech quality of VoWiFi calls in progress. In the advanced mode of operation, the traffic load in affected APs is proactively reduced by reconfiguring ongoing calls before rejecting the new call. Simulation results show that the number of simultaneous VoWiFi calls under guaranteed quality increases with our unified call admission control scheme. When using the advanced mode of operation, the number of simultaneous calls under guaranteed quality can be doubled when compared to the standard mode of operation.