The value of these Ruckus innovations in enabling high-quality voice services became evident when developers at Republic Wireless, the innovative "Wi-Fi First" mobile operator, encountered performance issues with their corporate Wi-Fi network that impacted their testing environments. The company then contacted Ruckus.
Ruckus' innovations for carrier-class Wi-Fi calling include a number of advancements designed to optimize roaming and quality of service (QoS) for delay-sensitive voice traffic, including:
Automatic QoS heuristics
allow prioritizing Wi-Fi call traffic by looking at the Type of Service (ToS) bits set by the smartphone in the IP header, or by using automatic packet flow heuristics that constantly analyze the size and frequency of packets in any flow, encrypted or not.
Capacity-based client access control:
If many new devices attempt to connect to a given Wi-Fi access point (AP), already connected clients may experience service disruptions. To help ensure a high-quality user experience for existing clients, Ruckus ZoneFlex™ APs can implement a capacity-based client access control algorithm that rejects connection requests from new clients. This new feature allows businesses to protect the user experience during periods of high traffic.
Directed
roaming, when leveraging the 802.11v standard, helps ensure the overall quality of the user experience across the entire wireless LAN (WLAN) by directing clients to a different Wi-Fi access point that can provide a better user experience. If a signal drops below its user-defined power (RSSI) or capacity thresholds, Ruckus ZoneFlex access points can automatically provide a list of alternative access points and prompt the client to move to a closer one. This solves the problem of clients being stuck or locked to a particular access point, even if it no longer has the best connection.
Wi-Fi Multimedia Admission Control (WMM)
improves the performance of Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi networks for real-time voice and video services by preventing bandwidth oversubscription. By requiring clients to request a specific amount of bandwidth before connecting to a particular Ruckus ZoneFlex access point, the access point's management system then considers network load and channel connections before allowing clients to connect.
When combined with Ruckus BeamFlex™ technology, these innovations provide the necessary quality of service to support Wi-Fi calling applications. By focusing and adapting Wi-Fi signals along the best signal performance path, clients can connect at higher data rates, spending less time competing for access to the Wi-Fi medium. This reduces RF channel contention and the likelihood of collisions (increased jitter), frame loss, or packet retransmissions (increased latency) by dynamically adjusting the antenna pattern for each transmitted packet.
