In this work, we measure wireless local area network (WLAN) voice performance and capacity. While most WLAN applications today are data centric, the growing popularity of Voice over IP (VoIP) applications and the escalating trend towards convergence with cellular networks will catalyze an increased mix of voice traffic. Since voice applications must compete with each other and with simultaneous data applications for WLAN bandwidth, quantifying voice performance and capacity in the presence of background data traffic is an important issue. We offer a practical investigation into the ability of 802.11b MAC layer to support simultaneous voice and data. We quantify VoIP capacity for standard WLAN networks, indicative of those already in the field, as well as evaluate the practical benefits of implementing backoff control and priority queuing at the access point. Conclusions are drawn based on an extensive set of real-world measurements conducted using off-the-shelf equipment in a commercial testbed.

Label-switching technology enables high performance and flexible layer-3 packet forwarding based on the fixed-length label information that is mapped to the layer-3 packet stream. A label-switching router (LSR) forwards layer-3 packets based on their layer-3 address information or their label information that is mapped to the layer-3 address information. Two label-mapping policies have been proposed. One is traffic driven mapping, where the label is mapped for a layer-3 packet stream of each host-pair according to the actual packet arrival. The other is topology driven mapping, where the label is mapped in advance for a layer-3 packet stream toward the same destination network, regardless of actual packet arrival to the LSR. This paper evaluates the required number of labels under each of these two label-mapping policies using real backbone traffic traces. The evaluation shows that both label-mapping policies require a large number of labels. In order to reduce the required number of labels, we propose a label-mapping policy that is a combination of the two label-mapping policies above. This is traffic-driven label mapping for the packet stream toward the same destination network. The evaluation shows that the proposed label-mapping policy requires only about one-tenth as many labels as the traffic-driven label mapping for the host-pair packet stream and the topology-driven label mapping for the destination-network packet stream.

This paper describes an internetworking architecture and related protocol overview based on routers that have asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) cell switching capability in addition to conventional Internet protocol (IP) packet forwarding. The proposed architecture can provide high-throughput and low-latency switched paths for individual application flows or a group of application flows while retaining current router-based internetworking architecture. The proposed router is able to establish the switched path based on the characteristics of flows, e.g., arrival of a data packet with specific upper layer protocols or arrival of more than a certain amount of data packets in a predetermined period, as well as by the reception of an IP-layer resource reservation request, such as resource reservation protocol (RSVP). One important feature that is provided by the proposed router is interoperability with the emerging ATM network platform specified by the ATM Forum and the telecommunications sector of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-T). The proposed routers can be interconnected with each other over the point-to-point synchronous optical network link as well as over the ATM network platform, which provides permanent virtual channel, virtual path, or switched virtual channel (SVC) services. That enables network carriers to provide Internet/intranet services as well as others, such as telephony, ATM/time division multiplexing leased line, or native ATM SVC services.