JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 10, NOVEMBER2012 1

Measurements of Real Time Voice streaming Data over IEEE 802.11b

Pro CV Srikrishna and GK SrinivasaGowda
Abstract In this paper, we have performed lierature survey on Real time voice measurements over IEEE 802.11b wireless networks. The goals of this work are to collect the information and find the real issues with 802.11b wireless networks regarding real-time voice communication . In particular we will investigate the behaviour and performance of the network at the MAC layer in conjunction with the application layer, when a packetloss is reported. Similarly,we will look at how the 802.11b MAC protocol affects the jitter and delay of real-time voice. With this information we intend to obtain a better understanding of wireless networks suitability for voice communication. The data gathered as part of these investigations will be made available for further study. The introspect investigation of these issues will be benificial to lead research in voice measurements. Index Termswireless networks, IEEE 802.11b, voice over IP,voice quality, Quality of Service (QoS), loss, delay, jitter, MACperformance

1 INTRODUCTION
It seems like the days of wired networks are numbered.Wireless LANs[1] are rapidly gaining in popularity. The ease of deployment, low cost, high capacity plus mobility offered by the wireless infrastructure makes them a highly attractive alternative to the old wired network. Voice is already being touted as a potential application for these networks, primarily for lower price calls. The question that arises is: are wireless networks well suited for voice communication? One of the goals of this paper is to find an answer to this question. The wireless networks under study in this work are IEEE8 02.11b wireless LANs [10]. They provide transmission rates up to 11Mbps on the 2.4 Ghz band using direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) techniques. This frequency band was chosen because it is unlicensed; it means that nobody has to pay to use it. However, even though this is a major advantage, there is a clear trade-off. 802.11b networks have to share the frequency with other technologies, such as microwave ovens, cordless phones and/or Bluetooth devices. Another drawback of the 802.11b design is the lack of QoS support, though an extension to the standard that will add QoS, IEEE 802.11e[11] , is under development. Nevertheless, these drawbacks have not stopped the deployment of this technology in business, institutional and home wireless networks. Our work in this will be to study whether 802.11b networks can be used for voice communication in spite of the lack of QoS support. We will study how the inherent characteristics of the 802.11b design affect voice quality parameters. For this purpose, we will design measurement scenarios under different network set-ups, load conditions and environmental situations. This investigation will be done in Reference to work done by Nunes, who is conducting his masters thesis[12] in parallel with this one, but focusing on the QoS parameters at the application layer. Our work is further focused on the performance of 802.11b at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and its consequences for higher layers. 1While 802.11b networks have proved their appropriateness for best effort traffic, i.e. email, browsing, chat or file transfer, their lack of QoS support makes it questionable whether the use of realtime multimedia applications, such as voice communication, is possible using these wireless networks. In order to establish a successful voice session, three critical network parameters must be kept under certain levels. These parameters are loss, jitter and delay. A loss can be defined, in the scope of multimedia applications, as a packet that never reaches its destination, or a packet that arrives too late and thus cannot be used to play out the multimedia content. Most real- time multimedia applications are loss-tolerant, i.e. they can still provide a good perceived quality to the user even though a few packets are not delivered to the application. Jitter is defined as the variance of inter-packet arrival times compared to the inter-packet times of the original transmission. A buffer is commonly used to absorb this variation, at the cost of some delay. Jitters effect in voice communication is undesirable because it can lead either to additional packet losses or to additional delay. And finally, delay is the time that it takes the voice to travel from the sender to the receiver. This parameter is impor-

MCA , Department. PESIT Bangalore, India Electronics and Communication Department.College of Engineering 2012 JICT Christ UniversityBangalore, India www.jict.co.uk

tant in voice communication, because one-way delays over 150 ms lessen the interactivity [ITU-T G.114 recommendation];which means that none of the participants knows when the other has started or finished, leading to both users talking at
1In this document we will use

interchangeably the terms wireless LANs, wireless networks and WLANs to refer to a generic IEEE 802.11 wireless network. Background

the same time, or being silent.Since packet losses, delay and jitter are of such importanceto obtain a good perceived quality in (successful) voicecommunications, it is critical to know what causes the deteriorationof these parameters in a wireless network, and howthese parameters are affected by the 802.11b design. Whilstin wired networks the deterioration is generally caused by congestion, in wireless networks it can be caused both bydegradation of the signal (due to fading or interference)and/or congestion. The 802.11b design provides reliability when the environmental conditions are poor. Reliability is achieved through mechanisms such as ACK and RTS/CTS[10], detailed in the following paragraphs. However, the protocol design at the MAC layer does not provide any explicit QoSsupport[2] .The IEEE 802.11 standard was created to provide wireless connectivity between different devices. The standard defines the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC)layers, corresponding to the first and second layers of theOSI reference model [13]. The physical layer outlines communication parameters such as thefrequencies to use, the channel bandwidth, modulation schemes, the transmission rates and frame specification; additional information about the physical layer can be found in [10, section 12].The MAC layers main function is to coordinate howthe stations gain access to the medium in order to avoid collisions and how to give a somewhat fair distribution of the medium for all the stations. There are two modes of medium access, called distributed coordination function(DCF) and point coordination function (PCF). The latter is not supported by many 802.11 devices and it is outside the scope of this project; further information about PCF mode can be found in [10, section 9.3]. DCF mode is based on the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance(CSMA/CA) protocol. In a typical wireless LAN, several stations will try to access the medium, and if two of them want to transmit at the same time there will be a collision and none of them will succeed in transmitting their packets. Unlike the CSMA/CD (collision detection) protocol, used in Ethernet networks, stations cannot detect a collision because they are usually not full duplex, i.e. they cannot listen to the medium while they are transmitting. For this reason the protocol has to provide other means to detect (or avoid) such collisions. This is achieved through a positive acknowledge(ACK) scheme: when a station has received

properly a packet, it sends back an ACK frame to the sender, so that the sender knows about the successful delivery. If for some reason the ACK frame does not arrive at the sender, it willassume that the packet was not delivered, and the senderwill try to retransmit it later. It is evident that this ACKscheme provides certain reliability at the MAC layer, thoughit is not guaranteed that a packet arrives at the destination. It is the responsibility of other layers to ensure that. Thedrawback of this mechanism is the overhead that it adds tothe communication but it is necessary since link conditionsare highly variable in wireless networks.In order to resolve contention between several stationsin an optimal and fair way, the 802.11 standard defines anexponential back off algorithm, that works as follows: every time a station attempts to transmit, it waits for a random number of time slots (between 0 and a certain number) before transmitting. If the medium is sensed free, the station transmits. If not, it increases the number n and waitsfor another random number of slots, repeating the same procedure until the packet is finally transmitted or discarded if the number of attempts reaches a limit that can be defined previously [10, section 9.2.5.3]. This mechanism increasesthe possibility of a successful transmission when the network is somewhat loaded.IEEE 802.11b defines two modes of building wirelessLANs: infrastructure and ad-hoc. The former relies onan access point (AP), that is the node which all the mobile stations within the same cell are connected to. In this mode,all the traffic passes through the AP no matter the destination. There is a possibility to extend the size of a wirelessLAN, interconnecting several APs (via wire or wireless),thus permitting the stations to roam between adjacent cells. It is worth noting that only three channels can be usedsimultaneously without interference, so network designers have to be specially careful to not overlap frequencies usedin areas that are close to one other. In the so calledadhocmode, the network consists of end stations only. This isuseful when a connection between two or more stations is desired (file sharing for instance) and no AP is available. II. RELATED WORK There is a large amount of literature regarding performance of 802.11b networks. Most of it focuses on simulations and modeling but there are also experiments with real networks. In addition, several enhancements to the actual standard have been proposed, in order to provide animproved QoS for real-time multimedia applications. In the next paragraphs we present a brief summary of some of the articles and papers that are related to this work, with their conclusions and resul1) Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11b: An Analysis of Short-Term Fairness in Wireless Media Access Protocols[1]. In this paper, E. Koksal et al. analyze the short-termfairness of several

medium access protocols and their conclusion is that CSMA/CA is not specially fair compared to other mechanisms. However, they state that there is a good tradeoff between throughput and fairness. They also affirm that a poor short-term fairness can significantly affectrealtime audio and video in terms of jitter.Analysis of 802.11b MAC: A QoS, Fairness and PerformancePerspective[2]. In this paper S. Sharma highlightsIEEE 802.11b issues, namely QoS, fairness and performance.Regarding QoS, he remarks that the DCF mode provides only best effort services, and no guarantees are givenin terms of delay and jitter. In relation with the previouspaper, he states that the unfairness of CSMA/CA is due tothe fact that collisions in wireless LANs are asymmetric. Healso analyses some of the causes that reduce performance in802.11b, like the RTS/CTS/ACK mechanisms or the slowertransmission rate of headers (headers are always transmitted at 1 Mbps). They suggest also some improvements that couldbe applied at different levels (physical, MAC, UDP, TCP)TCP and UDP performance over a Wireless LAN [3].Through a set of measurements, George Xylomenos et al.examine potential TCP and UDP performance problems.They investigate their causes and make a review of severalproposed enhancements.Performance Analysis of the IEEE 802.11 DistributedCoordination Function [4]. This paper provides an analyticalstudy of DCFs performance. The author evaluates both basicand RTS/CTS access mechanisms and conclude that the lastone should be used in almost all the practical cases, due toits superior capabilities in terms of coping with the hiddennode problem and performance in large network scenarios.Operational and Fairness Issues with ConnectionlessTraffic Over IEEE 802.11b [5].A dissertation about fairness from Theo Pagtzis et al. In this case the authors present an experimental evaluation of IEEE 802.11b, giving analytical results of performance, throughput and error rates obtained in different scenarios. An interesting conclusion is the unfairness of the protocol, due to the fact that it sets a lowestcommon denominator of transmission rate for all the stationsassociated with the AP of a single cell, that is inherentlyunfair for any 802.11b station operating at signaling rateabove 1 MbpsScheduling timeSensitive traffic on 802.11 wirelessLANs [6] In this report it is shown that hosts generatingtime-sensitive traffic in a 802.11b cell may benefit from low delays even in saturation conditions, if the packet rate is keptunder certain value.Real time Voice Measurements over 802.11b wirelessnetwork[21]In this paper it has been researched over performance issues of real time voice measurements over IEEE802.11b wireless networks. The goals of these measurements are to assess whether there are significant issueswith 802.11b wireless networks regarding real-time voice communica-

tion. In particular we will investigate the behavior and performance of the network at the MAC layerin conjunction with the application layer, when a packetloss is reported. Similarly, he has been looked at how the802.11b MAC protocol affects the jitter and delay of realtimevoice. With this information we intend to obtain abetter understanding of wireless networks suitability forvoice communication. The data gathered as part of theseinvestigations will be made available for further study.Theintrospect investigation of these issues will be benificialtolead research in voice measurements 2) vice over IP in WLANs: Voice transmission in anIEEE 802.11 WLAN based access network [21]. In this paper they compare the suitability of the DFC and PCFprotocols for audio transmission, via simulations, and theyconclude that PCF performs better at high transmission rates.Capacity estimation of VoIP channels on WirelessNetworks[8] [8]. This is a study of the capacity of WLANsfor VoIP channels that shows an upper bound for the numberof successful VoIP calls that a typical 802.11b network can handle. In this paper, the authors make measurements inan actual WLAN and simulations with ns2 to compare theresults.Internet Telephony Over WLANs [9]. In this report, they address the issues that can make difficult to deploy multimedia communications in WLANs. They offer an overview of VoIP and wireless LANs, and also provide results of several experiments done in different scenarios. One of these experiments is the measurement of the influence that mobility and interference have on jitter and loss.These and other papers show that certainly there are issues regarding QoS in wireless networks. Through ourexperiments we will see, with data gathered from real scenarios, how those issues manifest themselves.What does a reader need to know to understand the finalreportReaders of this document must be somewhat familiar withnetworking. Knowledge of the OSI reference model is veryhelpful, since much emphasis will be put on the relationbetween packets of different layers. A basic idea of howmultimedia applications work (coding, transmission, qualityparameters, etc.) can also be required to understand thereport. Knowledge of wireless networks is not necessary,since an introduction to wireless networks will be providedin the final report.

III. CONCLUSION This and other reference papers show that certainly thereare issues regarding QoS in wireless networks. Throughour experiments we will see, with data gathered from realscenarios, how those issues manifest themselves.What doesa reader need to know to understand the final report sincemuch emphasis will be put on the relation between packetsof different layers. A basic idea of

how multimedia applicationswork (coding, transmission, quality parameters, etc.)can also be required to understand the report. Knowledge ofwireless networks is not necessary, since an introduction towireless networks will be provided in the final report.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to thank Dr Ivan Joseph, Associate Dean of College of Engineering Christ University Bangalore for his valuable co-operation for my entire work . REFERENCES
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