Analysis of voice capacity in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs with/without data traffic

IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area networks (WLANs) are becoming more and more popular in home, office, enterprise and public areas primarily due to their low cost, simplicity of installation and mobility for users. On the other hand, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is poised to become an important Internet application. The combination of these two technologies, i.e. VoIP over WLAN, attracts more and more attentions. In this paper, models are presented to investigate the voice capacity in IEEE 802.11 WLANs with/without simultaneous data traffic. Although the channel data rate is so high, no more than a few voice sessions can be supported due to various protocol overheads, especially when there are data traffic flows in the network.