A comparative survey of adaptive codec solutions for VoIP over multirate WLANs: a capacity versus quality performance trade-off

Abstract

In multi-rate WLANs, users can suffer transmission rate changes due to the link adaptation mechanism. This results in a variable capacity channel, which is very hostile for VoIP and can cause serious quality of service (QoS) degradation in all active calls. Various codec adaptation mechanisms have been proposed as a solution to this, as well as to solve congestion problems on WLAN environments. Here, these solutions are presented, categorized according to the adaptation policy and scenario they implement, and evaluated at call-level in terms of the resulting blocking and dropping probabilities, as well as the perceived voice quality. To define a common performance metric, a new index named VGoS-factor is presented, which, by combining these capacity and quality indicators, can provide an overall view of the capacity versus quality trade-off of the proposed mechanisms and consequently help in choosing the adequate policy for each scenario