A New Method to Boost VoIP Performance Over IPv6 Networks

Abstract The demands on virtual communication have increased noticeably during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. As an essential part of virtual communication, VoIP should be promoted to achieve the desired level of performance. One critical area investigated in VoIP is the bandwidth utilization (BWU) of the VoIP over IPv6 networks. Enhancing BWU will impact call capacity and quality; it increases call capacity and boosts call quality. Unfortunately, a considerable amount of bandwidth is wasted when running VoIP over IPv6 networks. This is due to the large size of the IPv6 header and the small size of the speech frame. This paper proposes a new method to handle the inefficient BWU when running VoIP over IPv6 networks. The proposed method combines multiplexing multiple VoIP packets in one IPv6 header and using the superfluous fields to carry a portion of the speech frame. Therefore, the proposed is called packet multiplexing and carrier fields (PMCF). Investigation of the PCMF method has been done using four metrics to measure the promotion in BWU, namely calls capacity, header size, bandwidth saving, and speech frame shortening metrics. With the four metrics, the PMCF method has outperformed the comparable methods. For instance, the call capacity has been promoted by up to 269% compared to the typical IPv6 method in the tested scenarios. Therefore, the PMCF method is a feasible solution to facilitate the BWU of VoIP when running VoIP over IPv6 networks.