Performance Evaluation of VoIP CODECS over WiMAX and UMTS Networks

Abstract

Real-time services such as VoIP are becoming popular and are major revenue earners for network service providers. VoIP applications are being widely used in today's networks challenging their capabilities to provide a good quality of experience level to the users. Considering the current large deployment of WiMAX and UMTS networks and the promising integration of the two networks sooner or later, it is necessary to study their QoS differences and compare between their QoS models when using a real-time service such as VoIP. In this research VoIP is used as an application to study the QoS differences between UMTS and WiMAX, in order to investigate how well these two networks cope with real-time multimedia applications. This research included a simulation for the UMTS network and WiMAX network for different traffic types transmitted over the networks using OPNET simulation software. Important performance metrics such as MOS, end-to-end delay, jitter and packet delay variation were evaluated and analyzed. The Comparison results show that WiMAX network is better in serving VoIP application because of the low packet processing delay and the affect of changing CODECs.