Impact of channel bonding on network performance in real-time applications

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of channel bonding property provided in wireless technology on performance in real-time applications. IEEE 802.11n is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) standard, which aims to extensively improve network throughput over legacy WLANs. This new network technology provides a better performance for general Internet applications such as web service and file transfer. However, the recent network measurements show that real-time application traffic is consistently increasing in the Internet. Real-time applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) or video conferencing requires distinct performance metrics compared to the general Internet services in that they prioritize delay, latency, and delay jitter rather than network throughput. This paper investigates how such real-time applications perform in IEEE 802.11n WLANs. Our indoor experiments show that 802.11n basically supports better service than the previous WLAN standards. The channel bonding technique in 802.11n further improves the performance even under mobile conditions.