Experimental measurements for VoIP with network coding in IEEE 802.11

Over the last decade, VoIP has had a fast growth particularly in Small Office Home Office environments overloading the wireless accesses in the last mile. Network Coding schemes have advantageous features for throughput performance but VoIP is a delay critical service requiring fast routing algorithms. In this paper, we design, implement and measure experimental values for a network coding based VoIP phone calls in 802.11. Our proposed method is achieved by a new packet format compliant with current protocols that facilitates the exchange of linearly combined packets. Servers and user agents are implemented in C code and tests for up to 10 VoIP phone calls have been performed under wireless networks. Results have shown that network coding is a feasible methodology for up to 6 pairs of users with a notably throughput performance gain.