How Ruckus Wireless Can Enable Carrier-Class Wi-Fi Calling

Ruckus Wireless, Inc introduced a collection of new Smart Wi-Fi technology software innovations that address the growing demand for higher quality IP-based voice calling over Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi Calling).

These new Ruckus technology innovations are being integrated as standard features within the Ruckus portfolio of Smart Wi-Fi products to help ensure crystal clear Wi-Fi Calling voice quality in the most challenging Wi-Fi environments. These new technology innovations will be demonstrated by Ruckus for the first time at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain (Ruckus booth #5E41) and have been successfully tested with two of the biggest mobile network operators (MNOs) in the United States.

Tweet this “The innovations we’ve made will improve the reliability and quality of Wi-Fi Calling applications, which enables both service providers and enterprises to extract greater value from their Wi-Fi infrastructure,” said Dan Rabinovitsj, Chief Operating Officer at Ruckus Wireless. “While voice over Wi-Fi isn’t new, the ability to deliver a carrier-class voice service over Wi-Fi is something that no one has mastered, until now.”

The new Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi innovations for Wi-Fi Calling address essential roaming and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. The new innovations support real-time, bidirectional voice calls that demand a narrow set of operating parameters from the network designed to ensure the highest quality Wi-Fi Calling experience.

The Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi innovations include a variety of new proprietary capabilities such as capacity-based client access control, Wi-Fi multimedia admission controls, directed roaming, and automatic packet flow heuristics. The integration of these and other new Smart Wi-Fi innovations into Ruckus products helps organizations ensure optimal performance of voice over Wi-Fi communications.

The value of these Ruckus innovations to support high quality voice services was evidenced when the developers at Republic Wireless, the groundbreaking “Wi-Fi First” mobile operator, encountered performance issues with their corporate Wi-Fi network that impacted testing environments. Republic turned to Ruckus. “As a pioneer in ‘Wi-Fi First’ smartphone technology, Republic requires the highest performance from our corporate wireless network,” said David Morken, co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Republic Wireless. “With Ruckus, we’ve got the Wi-Fi environment our engineers require in order to continue delivering new services and features for our customers.”

Crystal Clear Voice over Smarter Wi-Fi

The new Ruckus technology innovations for carrier-class Wi-Fi Calling include a number of advances designed to optimize roaming and quality of service (QoS) for delay-sensitive voice traffic, including:

Automatic QoS Heuristics

This is the ability to prioritize Wi-Fi Calling 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 examine the size and frequency of packets in any flow, encrypted or not.

Capacity-Based Client Access Control

If too many new devices attempt to connect to a given Wi-Fi access point (AP), already connected clients may experience service degradation. To help ensure existing clients’ quality of user experience, Ruckus ZoneFlex™ APs can now implement a capacity-based client access control algorithm to decline connection requests from new clients. This new feature allows organizations to protect the user experience during periods of heavy load.

Directed Roaming

Leveraging the 802.11v standard, directed roaming helps to ensure the overall quality of user experience for the entire wireless LAN (WLAN) network by directing clients toward another Wi-Fi access point that can provide a better user experience. If a signal falls below user-definable signal strength (RSSI) or throughput thresholds, Ruckus ZoneFlex APs can automatically provide a list of alternative access points and request the client to move to a closer AP. This solves the problem of clients that stay connected or ‘sticky’ with a given AP, even if it no longer provides the best connection.

Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) Admission Control

WMM admission control improves the performance of Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi networks for real time voice and video services by preventing oversubscription of bandwidth. By requiring clients to request a specific amount of bandwidth before connecting to a given Ruckus ZoneFlex AP, bandwidth management on each AP now takes into account network load and channel connections before allowing clients to connect.

When combined with Ruckus BeamFlex™ technology, these new innovations provide the necessary Quality of Service to support Wi-Fi Calling applications. By focusing and adapting Wi-Fi signals over the best performing signal path, clients can connect at higher data rates, spending less time contending for access to the Wi-Fi medium. This reduces contention for the RF channel and the likelihood of collisions (increased jitter), frame loss, or packet retransmissions (increased latency) by dynamically adjusting the antenna pattern for each and every packet transmitted.