A delay-aware packet prioritisation mechanism for voice over IP in Wireless Mesh Networks

This work proposes a novel Delay-aware Packet Prioritisation Mechanism (DPPM) to uniformly distribute the Quality of Service (QoS) level across all Voice Over IP (VoIP) calls in a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). The method prioritises VoIP packets based on the amount of queueing delay that has been accumulated across multiple hops within the WMN. The accumulated queueing delay is piggybacked over every VoIP packet and is used at the enqueueing phase to place more delayed packets towards the head of the queue. This assures higher priority for more delayed VoIP packets over less delayed VoIP packets. The influence of the queueing delay on voice call quality is further reduced by utilising the proposed DPPM in conjunction with WiFi frame aggregation. This conjunction increases the network's VoIP call capacity, and this is validated through NS-3 simulations.