Performance enhancement of Wi-Fi ad-hoc network for VoIP support

Janusz Romanik(1), Piotr Gajewski(2), Jacek Jarmakiewicz(1,2)

(1) (2)

Military Communication Institute Radiocommunication Department Warszawska 22A, 05-130 Zegrze, Poland
(1)

Military University of Technology Faculty of Electronics S.Kaliskiego 2, 00-908 Warsaw, Poland

j.romanik@wil.waw.pl, (2)pgajewski@wel.wat.edu.pl, (2) jjarmakiewicz@wel.wat.edu.pl

ABSTRACT During ten recent years a rapid development of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks was observed. As they offer the advantage of a high data rate, a low cost and a small size of devices, nowadays they seem to be ubiquitous. Despite the fact, that WLANs were initially designed for data transport, they are also convenient to provide real time data support. There were proposed many new mechanisms intended to increase VoIP quality in WLANs, usually with infrastructure. On the other hand, it is also tempting to use wireless networks for voice service in ad-hoc mode. This approach is much more demanding, however offers mobility and communication in areas without infrastructure or in every place with damaged infrastructure. From this point of view, ad-hoc wireless networks may be very promising solutions for small groups of users, e.g. a special unit of soldiers, a fire brigade, a police squad or a team of rescuers. In this article the capacity of 802.11 WLAN network for voice support was analyzed. It was assumed that a wireless network is developed in an urban environment and is based on IEEE 802.11b standard. The authors concentrated on VoIP service which is typically used for communication within small groups of users and they concluded that the communication range was sufficient to cover the area of interest and there will be no effect of a hidden node. For the network defined in such manner a set of new mechanisms was proposed. These mechanisms include a channel utilization measurement, the adaptation of MAC protocol parameters, a closed network mode with a Resource Manager and the Admission Control functionality. Simulations results confirmed the efficiency of new mechanisms allowing for the management of network resources and a better channel utilization.
Keywords: WLAN ad-hoc network, VoIP, channel utilization, bandwidth measurement

INTRODUCTION The goal of this article is to present new mechanisms improving RT services support in ad-hoc Wi-Fi network. These mechanisms are based on a free bandwidth measurement, which is performed simultaneously and continuously by all stations in the network. It was assumed that a wireless network is developed in an urban environment and is based on IEEE 802.11b standard. The authors concentrated on VoIP service which is typically used for communication within small groups of users, e.g. a special unit of soldiers, a fire brigade, a police squad or a team of rescuers. They also assumed that all nodes can see each other and there is no hidden station effect.

For such assumptions a set of new mechanisms was proposed, including a channel utilization measurement, the adaptation of MAC protocol parameters and the queuing of RT traffic in a closed network mode. Bandwidth Prediction Control Protocol (BPCP) was proposed to monitor radio parameters of Wi-Fi stations and to assess the available bandwidth. BPCP takes advantage of WLAN card drivers that enable the measurement of SNR and BER parameters in PHY layer and their passing to the Data Link Layer. Bandwidth utilization is assessed in all nodes of the network independently and continuously for predefined periods called Sampling Intervals. Having knowledge of a current and the previous free bandwidth, BPCP is able to make predictions for the next period.
Application Layer RT traffic shaping

Transport Layer BPCP Network Layer AM mode on/off AM mode initiation Closed network triggering Codec negotiation

Closed Network Controlled Access

RT traffic queueing VoIP call request

Data Link Layer

Medium Access Ctrl

FER, data rate SNR, BER Radio parameters masurement Free bandwidth assessment STD/AM switching

Physical Layer NSOM initiation

Fig. 1. BPCP alignment with protocol stack PROBLEM DEFINITION Nowadays Wi-Fi networks seem to be ubiquitous. They are very attractive thanks to a high data rate and a low cost and the size of devices that can be easily used. On the other hand, there are some limitations, i.e. vulnerability to DoS attacks [1,2] and insufficient support for RT services [3,4]. Lets consider VoIP service in Wi-Fi network in the contention mode with data rate set to 11Mbps. Assuming the average Backoff period equal to 300s, standard physical layer parameters (DIFS=50 s, SIFS=10 s, SlotTime=20s) and UDP Payload equal to 30 Byte, the total radio channel occupation takes 919.9 s, while the transmission of UDP Payload takes only 21.8s. If UDP Payload is equal to 80 Bytes, the total radio channel occupation reaches 956.3s, while the transmission of UDP Payload takes only 58.2s. Figure 2 shows an example of the channel utilization in Wi-Fi network for UDP service. Preamble, PLCP Header and

ACK are always transmitted with basic data rate. Only MAC/IP/UDP Headers and UDP Payload are transmitted with the highest possible data rate, in this case 11Mbps. MEASUREMENT OF CHANNEL UTILIZATION Since ad-hoc networks are bandwidth limited, not all measurement methods can be applied to measure channel utilization. In [5,6] metrics and methods dedicated for wireless networks were proposed, however for further development and adaptation, the solution presented in [7] was chosen. It allows all stations to measure the channel occupation continuously and independently, without generating additional traffic. This method takes advantage of transmission rules and stations behavior in Wi-Fi network. All nodes in the network use the same channel. All frames that have been sent by one node are then received by all nodes. After receiving a frame, nodes examine if this frame is consistent with a standard and check possible transmission errors. Then SNR and BER are determined. Some useful parameters are extracted from the received frame: frame length and data rate. In the next step, if there were no errors, the frame is sent to the data link layer.
Period required for transmission of one DATA frame and ACK

DIFS 5.5Mb/s DATA t1 Backoff td1

SIFS 1Mb/s ACK tACK tFREE

DIFS 2Mb/s DATA Backoff td2

SIFS 1Mb/s ACK t ACK t2

Fig. 2. Transmission observed from Data Link Layer - contention mode

The channel utilization factor for a predefined period of time can be calculated as follows:
U= td 1 + td 2 + 2 t ACK + 2 SIFS + 2 DIFS t2 t1

[1]

To assess the network throughput in a contention mode, theoretical analysis was performed and simulations were made using OMNET++ v4.0 simulation tool. Following parameters were assumed:

DIFS = 50s; PLCP header + Preamble = 192s, Backoff =300s (avg), ACK =304s,

transmission rate: 2Mb/s, voice codec: G.711, standard protocols (MAC header = 30B, IPv4 header =20B, UDP header = 8B) Tab. 1. ITU-T G.711 codec characteristics
Codec Bit rate [kb/s] Framing interval [ms] Payload [B] Packets/sec G.711 64 20 160 50

Time required for the transmission of data frame and the acknowledgement of frame takes near 1,8ms. Taking into consideration that frames are periodically generated every 20ms it is possible to send 11 acknowledged frames during 1 second. As a result, it is possible to get network throughput equal to 1,3Mb/s (see Fig. 3).
1800 1600 1400 Throughtpu [kb/s] 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 Number of VoIP calls

Theory

Simulation

Fig. 3. Wi-Fi network throughput - contention mode, data rate 2Mb/s MAC PROTOCOL MODES At the beginning of operation, special Wi-Fi stations can cooperate with commercial and use standard access schemes, until BPCP detects too small bandwidth and initiates the Acquisitive Mode (AM) [8]. During AM mode the Backoff interval is minimized according to the type of service. As a result, special stations prevail over the network. Only a small part of bandwidth can be hard-won by the rest of users. To

determine the Backoff interval, the Contention Window parameter is used, however different values have been introduced, depending on the type of a frame (Control, Data, Broadcast or RealTimeData in AM). Below are presented the adjusted values of a transmission characteristic:
cwMinCtrl = 7; cwMaxCtrl = 15; cwMinRT_AM = 15; cwMax_RT_AM = 31; cwMinData = 31; cwMax = 1023; cwMinBroadcast = 31.

If the available bandwidth is still too small, BPCP triggers another mechanism called the Network Self-Organizing Mechanism, which is responsible for creating a closed network. From this moment Wi-Fi network operates in a point-coordinated mode. Fig. 4 presents the finite states machine for the proposed protocol extension.
U - Measure

U>U1

802.11b MAC Acquisitive Mode

U>U2

U - Measure

802.11b Standard DCF

U<U1

U<U2

Closed Network Controlled Access

U - Measure

U<U1 for period T1

Fig. 4. MAC protocol states for a modified station NETWORK SELF-ORGANIZING MECHANISM Results of simulations taken in order to estimate the acceptable number of VoIP connections, depending on the type of voice codec and MAC parameters in a contention mode, were discussed in [8]. However, the question where to implement the Admission Control (AC) mechanism and how to manage the traffic in the network still remains open. AC mechanism is necessary to prevent new calls if there is not enough bandwidth. In a contention mode network stations are not aware of the traffic load and try to transmit frames every time they have a packet in buffer to send. For this reason, a close network mode was proposed with a station named the Network Resource Manager (NRM) that organizes the traffic queue. At the beginning, all stations work in a contention mode with standard parameters. In background, Neighbor Discovery Procedure is performed (Fig. 5), which is based on

exchanging Neighbor Request and Neighbor Response frames [9]. This procedure allows recognizing the surroundings by collecting data from other nodes, namely: received signal strength and noise, battery level and rank of station. Based on this information, each station determines its own NRM Readiness coefficient, which describes whether the station is ready to play a network manager role.
BPCP detects too small Bandwidth NRM Determined Request for RT Traffic RT Traffic Queue Distributed NRM Requests for RT RT Traffic Queue Distributed

Ad-hoc AM Mode Mode Initiation Standard Access Scheme

NSOM Initiation

NRM Timeout Elapsed Next Period

t

MAC Acquisitive Mode

NRM Determining

RT Traffic Queuing

VoWiFi Connections

RT Traffic Queuing

VoWiFi Connections

Neighbor Discovery Procedure

Fig. 5. Procedures and phases supplement to Wi-Fi ad-hoc network If BPCP detects the insufficient bandwidth coincidence, a station changes the mode to AM, while Neighbor Discovery Procedure is still in background. When a first station detects the insufficient bandwidth, it initiates Network Self-Organizing Mechanism (NSOM). Only stations with certain NRM Readiness coefficient are allowed to participate in this phase. If necessary, information about the network topology is refreshed by sending NRM Request frame, which contains last NRM Readiness coefficient of the sending station. Then, the station with the highest coefficient answers with Request for RT frame. Since this moment, Wi-Fi network operates in a closed mode and all traffic is controlled by the resource manager till NRM Timeout elapses and NRM Determining procedure starts again.
Standard contention mode or AM NSOM Initiation NRM Determined

Neighbour Request

Neighbour Resp. 1

Neighbour Resp. 2

Neighbour Resp. N

NRM Determining

Request for RT
t

Fig. 6. Neighbor Discovery procedure MANAGEMENT OF RT TRAFFIC When NRM station is determined, it sends NRM Request broadcast frame informing that nodes are allowed to call for a bandwidth reservation. Some stations respond with RT Confirm frame if they have RT packets to send. NRM Request frame is sent periodically to disseminate the list of queued stations and also a current queue limit, Fig.7.

New NRM Determined

RT Queue Distribution

NRM STA

NRM Request RT Confirm 1

NRM Request RT Confirm 2

NRM Request RT Confirm N

RT Queue

Fig. 7. RT traffic queuing procedure If the queue limit is reached or NRM Req Timeout elapsed, NRM station sends
RT Queue frame informing about:

queue size: number of STAs in queue, number of cycles: number of queue repetition, type of voice codec, data rate, MAC address and order of stations in the queue.

After receiving RT Queue frame, the first station on the list is allowed to transmit after DIFS and receives ACK frame after SIFS, Fig.8. The next station in queue transmits data frame after DIFS. The number of cycles describes how many times the stations will transmit in a given order. After each transmission of DATA and ACK, stations decrease their TransmissionIndex and are allowed to send after it reaches zero. After a predefined number of cycles NRM station sends again NRM Request frame to give a chance to transmit for stations that were out of queue during the preceding period.
RT Queue Distribution

1st cycle

2nd cycle

NRM Timeout Elapsed

New NRM Determined

DIFS RT Queue

SIFS ACK

DIFS

SIFS

DIFS

SIFS DATA 1 ACK

DIFS

SIFS ACK Reqest for RT New NRM Reqest Determination for RT t

DATA 1

DATA 2

ACK

DATA 2

1st NRM Period

2nd NRM Period

Fig. 8. RT data synchronous transmission phase in a closed network mode MANAGEMENT FRAMES STRUCTURE In order to organize a closed network and manage RT traffic, the following management frames were introduced (Fig. 9):
Neighbor Request and Neighbor Response - for neighborhood discovering, NRM Request - for initiation of RT traffic queuing phase, RT Confirm - for confirmation of the bandwidth reservation, RT Queue - distribution of RT traffic queue.

Because all of these frames are of a broadcast type, all receiving stations are forced to process it in the data link layer, although acknowledgement is not sent. The structure of new frames shown in Fig. 9 is the same as defined in IEEE 802.11 standard for management frames and consists of MAC Header and Frame Body containing information fields [10].
Neighbour Request NRM Request RT Queue Management frame type 00 subtype 0110 Management frame type 00 subtype 1101 Management frame type 00 subtype 1111 Neighbour Resp. RT Confirm Management frame type 00 subtype 0111 Management frame type 00 subtype 1110

Fig. 9. Management frames types and subtypes MAC Header contains a Frame Control field to define type and subtype of the frame. There are five defined combinations of bits that are reserved for future use. These combinations were used to create a new type of management frames (Fig. 10).
MAC Header Octets: 2 Frame Control 2 Duration 6 Destination Address 6 Source Address 6 BSS ID 2 Seq. Control 0 2312 Frame Body 4 FCS

Octets:

1 Element ID

1 Length

Variable length

Octets:

1 Element ID

1 Length

1 Station Energy

ID 7

Octets:

1 Element ID

1 Length

1 NRM Readiness

1 Neighbour Req. Count

1 ...

Neighbour# 1SNR from MAC Address station # 1

Neighbour # N SNR from MAC Address station # N

Neighbour Request and Neighbour Reponse ID 8 frame structure

Octets :

1 Element ID

1 Length

1 Queue Limit

6 In Queue: STA # 1 MAC Address

6 In Queue: STA # 2 ... MAC Address

6 In Queue: STA # N MAC Address

ID 9 NRM Request frame structure ID 10

Octets :

1 Element ID

1 Length

1 NRM End Return to STD

Octets:

1 Element ID

1 Length

1 RT Confirm

RT Confirm frame structure ID 11

1 1 1 6 Station # 1 MAC Address 1 6 1 Sequence No. # M

Octets:

1 Element ID

1 Length

Queue No. of Voice Data Size Cycles Codec Type Rate

Sequence Station # N ... No. #1 MAC Address

RT Queue frame structure ID 12

Fig. 10. Management frames format

SIMULATION SCENARIO Simulation tests were performed for a simplified model of synchronous RT data transmission in a closed network mode. The aim of simulation was to assess the channel utilization and the number of possible simultaneous VoIP calls as a function of data rate. Following assumptions were made: network stations with commercial voice codec (G.711) with attributes defined in table 2, MAC/PHY SIFS = 10 s, , packets with standard protocol headers: MAC = 30B, IPv4 =20B, UDP = 8B.
1Mb/s 100 90
Channel Utilization [%]

parameters:

PLCP Header + Preamble = 192 s,

DIFS = 50 s,

2Mb/s

5,5Mb/s

11Mb/s

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28
Number of VoIP connections

Fig. 11. Channel utilization during synchronous transmission of RT frames The channel utilization versus the number of number of VoIP calls and the channel throughput was shown in Fig. 11. In the phase of synchronous RT data transmission there are only two cases when the channel is idle. DIFS that precedes data frame transmission and SIFS between data and ACK frames. An increasing number of VoIP connections leads to a linear growth of channel utilization, up to 90%. Better channel utilization is unachievable. It is a result of the fact that although the number of frames sent in given period increases for higher data rates, there are still constant idle periods that separate frames. The delay of RT packets results from the data rate and the sequence number of a given station in the whole queue. Thus, this delay does not exceed two dozens of milliseconds.

While the network works with the data rate set to 1Mb/s, the transmission of one data frame in a radio channel takes 1936s. Taking into account the duration of ACK frame, SIFS and DIFS periods, the total channel occupation equals 2,3ms. Because a voice codec generates packets every 20ms, it is possible to set up RT traffic queue coming from maximum 8 stations. Any additional activity of the station will cause collisions and the channel utilization degradation. When the data rate grows, the time needed for transmission of one frame is shorter, while DIFS and SIFS remain on the same level. Therefore it is possible to set up more VoIP connections, however the channel utilization can not exceed 90%. A maximum of thirteen VoIP connections is achievable for 2Mb/s data rate and twenty two for 5.5Mb/s. When the data rate is set up to 11Mb/s, up to 27 VoIP calls are available. RECAPITULATION This article presents VoIP support efficiency in Wi-Fi ad-hoc network based on IEEE 802.11b standard. Standard MAC protocol was enriched by new mechanisms increasing the number of VoIP calls, introducing AC, prioritization and network manager functionality. This paper described the mechanism allowing for the measurement of channel utilization coefficient and deciding when to initiate a closed network mode. It also presented subsequent procedures: neighbor discovery, NRM determining, queuing RT traffic and managing the transmission order, as well as explained the role and the structure of introduced management frames. The procedure of RT data synchronous transmission in a closed network mode was verified by simulation. Results of tests allowed estimating the channel utilization achieving almost 90% when synchronous transmission was applied. If the number of stations in a queue is set correctly, the delay of RT data frame transmission is limited to two dozens of milliseconds and results from the data rate. The proposed mechanisms were developed as a result of a completely new approach to the support of RT data transmission in Wi-Fi ad-hoc network. They enrich standard procedures and allow for an efficient utilization of the channel. BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] [2] [3] J.Bellardo S.Savage, 802.11 Denial-of-Service Attacks: Real Vulnerabilities and Practical Solutions, USENIX Security Symp. 2003 V.Gupta, S.Krishnamurthy, M.Faloutsos, DoS Attacs at the MAC layer in wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Milcom 2002 S.Choi, J.Yu, QoS Provisioning in IEEE 802.11 WLAN, 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

[4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

H.Yoon, JW.Kim, DY.Shin, Dynamic Admission Control in IEEEE 802.11e EDCA-based Wireless Home Network, IEEE Consumer Communication and Networking Conference, Jan. 2006 R.Prasad, M.Murray, C.Dovrolis, K.Claffy, Bandwidth Estimation: Metrics, Measurement Techniques, and Tools, IEEE Network, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 27-35, 2003 G.Chelius, I.Guerin Lassous, Bandwidth Estimation for IEEE 802.11-Based Ad Hoc Networks, IEEE Transactions on mobile computing, vol. 7, no. 10, 2008 C.Sarr at. al., A node-based available bandwidth evaluation in IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc networks, International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, vol. 21, 2006 J.Romanik, P.Gajewski, J.Jarmakiewicz, MAC Protocol Extension for VoIP Support in wi-fi adhoc Network in Urban Environment, Military Communications And Information Systems Conference 2009, Prague, Czech Republic M.Bednarczyk, M.Amanowicz, Wireless Relay Control Protocol (WRCP), Communications And Information Systems Conference 2007, Bonn, Germany Military

[9] [10]

IEEE Std 802.11-1999 Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) Specification, Standard IEEE 802.11