Performance Evaluation of VoIP Codecs over Network Coding in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is used for transmitting voice signals in a packet-switched Internet protocol (IP) networks in real time. For transmitting voice over a wireless mesh networks (WMNs), the analog voice signal has to be digitalized, encoded, and packetized. Codecs based on different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements are used. One of the main QoS requirements is that packets are transmitted through the network in real time; one-way transmission time or End-to-End (ETE) packet delay, and packet delay variation or jitter have to be lower than thresholds. ETE delay depends on various parameters; among them is also network delay. Various mechanisms are used to lower the network delay in WMNs. A promising mechanism, for improving the performance of streaming services such as the case also in VoIP, is network coding. In this paper, we evaluate the benefits of using wireless network coding for VoIP in WMNs. Network coding procedure in combination with various VoIP codecs is used to observe the impact on network delay and jitter of the VoIP application. The simulation results show that network coding can decrease network delay and jitter. Moreover, results show that network coding benefits are codec dependent.