Supporting VoIP communication in IEEE 802.11ax networks: A new admission control and scheduling resource allocation scheme

The current IEEE 802.11ax standard enhances Wi-Fi networks with a series of new features, such as multi-user (MU) transmission, an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) scheme and the ability to multiplex traffic from different access categories (ACs). These features can be utilized to enhance the QoS support for VoIP traffic and optimize the usage of IEEE 802.11ax network resources. This work proposes a new scheme to multiplex VoIP calls in IEEE 802.11ax MU frames and a new scheduler and resource allocation algorithm specifically designed for VoIP data traffic. Our scheduler allocates VoIP packets requiring longer transmission times into the same frame(s), minimizing the channel air-time assigned to VoIP transmission. In addition, unused radio resources in the MU frame are leveraged to transmit best-effort packets along with VoIP packets. For completeness, we also define a call admission control (CAC) algorithm that anticipates channel saturation conditions to ensure VoIP users can maintain a guaranteed level of QoS. Based on simulation results, our scheme is more efficient in reducing channel utilization than other schedulers such as multi-user round-robin (RR) (implemented by ns-3) or single-user FIFO. For example, for 30 VoIP stations using the G.711 codec under mixed channel conditions, our scheme reduces by 30% the air-time required to transmit VoIP packets. When coupled with the ability to also send best-effort packets along with VoIP packets, this translates into a higher throughput (i.e. 10 Mbit/s vs 4 Mbit/s) and more simultaneous VoIP users with guaranteed QoS (up to 46 VoIP users vs 26 and 28 users for the multi-user RR and single-user FIFO scheduling algorithms, respectively).