On packet aggregation mechanisms for improving VoIP quality in mesh networks

Performance in multihop wireless networks is known to degrade with the number of hops for both TCP and UDP traffic. For VoIP, the wireless network presents additional challenges as the perceived quality is dependent on loss, delay and jitter. Furthermore, small size of VoIP packets aggravates network utilization of the 802.11 based wireless mesh network. In this work, we evaluate the packet aggregation algorithms to reduce VoIP protocol overhead, compare the aggregation algorithms and propose a distributed packet aggregation mechanism. The experimental results demonstrates that the proposed distributed packet aggregation algorithm improves the VoIP quality and results in significant increase in the number high quality VoIP calls supported over multihop mesh.