Evaluation of VoIP Codecs over 802.11 Wireless Networks : A Measurement Study

Abstract: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has become very popular in recent days andbecome the first choice of small to medium companies for voice and data integration inorder to cut down the cost and use the IT resources in much more efficient way. Anotherpopular technology that is ruling the world after the year 2000 is 802.11 wirelessnetworks. The Organization wants to implement the VoIP on the wireless network. Thewireless medium has different nature and requirement than the 802.3 (Ethernet) andspecial consideration take into account while implementing the VoIP over wirelessnetwork.One of the major differences between 802.11 and 802.3 is the bandwidthavailability. When we implement the VoIP over 802.11, we must use the availablebandwidth is an efficient way that the VoIP application use as less bandwidth as possiblewhile retaining the good voice quality. In our project, we evaluated the differentcompression and decompression (CODEC) schemes over the wireless network for VoIP.To conduct this test we used two computers for comparing and evaluatingperformance between different CODEC. One dedicated system is used as Asterisk server,which is open source PBX software that is ready to use for main stream VoIPimplementation. Our main focus was on the end-to-end delay, jitter and packet loss forVoIP transmission for different CODECs under the different circumstances in thewireless network. The study also analyzed the VoIP codec selection based on the MeanOpinion Score (MOS) delivered by the softphone. In the end, we made a comparisonbetween all the proposed CODECs based on all the results and suggested the one Codecthat performs well in wireless network.