VoWiFi Roaming

Abstract: Freedom is human’s natural instinct, which was limited by Ethernet and Fixed Telephony Era. With the emergence of new technologies like wireless fidelity (WiFi) and voice over IP (VoIP) humans once again have freedom of movement; which at the very same time provides enough reasons to change the market dynamics of communication industry. The buzz of Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi) in recent years indicates that VoWiFi is shaping up as the next big challenge to traditional telephony, not only due to cost, but also due to range of services and amount of freedom it can offer. However, at the very same time these technologies have evolved to threaten the well-established telephony markets. Enterprise solutions for VoWiFi require enhanced security mechanism and seamless handovers. To address security related issues Wi-Fi Alliance in conjunction with IEEE introduced an enhanced and interoperable security scheme called WiFi Protected Access (WPA). Real time services are sensitive to latency, hence requiring bounded delay time throughout an ongoing session. Handovers in WiFi networks can take fairly long time which real time services cannot tolerate. The problem is further elevated when WiFi networks are secured by using WPA Enterprise. In this thesis we will examine the complete handoff process in WiFi networks. The impact of handovers on VoIP traffic will also be observed. Following the detailed analysis some suggestions will be presented concerning how to reduce this handoff latency.