Voice over Wi-Fi: Feasibility analysis

Once considered only a limited mean for short-range communication of best-effort traffic, Wi-Fi's roots have speared into way farther lands. Voice-over-Wi-Fi (VoWiFi) is an alternative data-driven IP-based dialing service for indoor users with poor cellular coverage. The recent rollout of iPhone6+ running IOS8 with novel Wi-Fi dialing feature spurred several operators around the world to invest on VoWiFi as a complementary service. As such, when cellular coverage is poor, calls are placed/switched over to wireless local area network (WLAN) in a transparent manner to users. Given the heterogeneity of the setup, a high uncertainity arises regarding whether the switching (handoff) task remains unnoticed to the users or not. There is also the issue of interference over WLAN as well as congestion in internet core that is often added to the obscurities. Inspired by these facts, this paper investigates the suitability of VoWiFi in satisfying the voice service quality requirements for home and small network users. Three different architectures are investigated based on handoff, load-balancing and repeater. The voice reception quality in terms of jitter, delay and packet loss is monitored for each architecture. It is observed that delay, jitter and packet loss are improved in repeater-based scenario whereas call drop is experienced in both handoff and load balancing scenarios.