Distributed Call Admission Control for VoIP over 802.11 WLANs Based on Channel Load Estimation

Call Admission Control (CAC) is recognized as one of the key strategies to achieve satisfactory QoS support for VoIP over IEEE 802.11 WLANs. However, most of the prior CAC solutions for VoIP over WLAN are centralized, and the few distributed CAC schemes proposed so far do not account for issues such as the loss of channel time due to medium contention and the coexistence of VoIP traffic with background traffic such as TCP data flows. In this paper, we describe a distributed CAC scheme which aims at addressing these issues by leveraging on channel monitoring techniques, thus being readily implementable in today's consumer devices. The proposed scheme is thoroughly evaluated by means of testbed experiments as well as network simulations in different scenarios, and it is shown to yield a better CAC performance with respect to prior solutions.