Experimental evaluation of community-based WLAN voice and data services

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this work is to experimentally evaluate the quality of voice and data services over community-based WLAN access networks. We use P2PWNC, the Wireless LAN roaming architecture that we have developed, as the basis for the provision of ubiquitous citywide WLAN access and set up an infrastructure for secure voice and data communications on top of it. Our scheme was designed with widely available, low-cost WLAN equipment in mind. Thus, we wish to estimate the performance penalty our proposed mechanisms incur for such devices and study their limitations as to the support for secure data and multimedia communications. In this work, we measure the maximum number of simultaneous voice calls that a P2PWNC-enabled access point can sustain, and the TCP throughput achieved by a single mobile station in the presence of simultaneous TCP flows by other P2PWNC users, when IPsec is employed to secure communications.

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
community networks, performance measurements, secure VoIP, wi-fi networks