Wireless LAN Optimization of HQ audio conferencing system using application layer protocol

Abstract

The goal of this thesis was to optimize a audio conferencing system that communicate via the standard Wi-Fi network and to provide a maximum transmission delay of 5 ms (one way end to end delay of 10 ms) when coexisting with an interferer that use up to 50% of the channel bandwidth. First the QoS performance provided by the existing 5th generation Wi-Fi standard is analysed in detail. The performance provided by WMM feature in the standard did not satisfy the requirements of the audio conferencing system. This lead to designing a protocol at the application layer (WHAP) that provided scheduling and retransmission mechanism that made it possible to achieve the required performance. The WHAP based audio conferencing BSS was analysed under different interference scenarios both in theory and in simulated environment using network simulator OPNET. The results show the possibility to provide the required performance when coexisting with an interference of up to 50% as targeted. Finally, it can be concluded that the performance of the audio conferencing setup configured with WHAP enabled stations provide much better performance compared to the available state-of-art standard techniques.