Advantages
Guaranteed Quality-of-Service
Every carrier and service provider looks for ways to increase service revenue and decrease costs. One obvious revenue-increasing service is VoIP since it is a value-added, fee-based service that reuses the same infrastructure that provides broadband Internet access. To enable VoIP and other value-added, latency-sensitive services, the wireless network must be capable of guaranteeing end-to-end quality-of-service. Fortunately, SkyPilot's system was designed from the beginning to provide low-latency, low-jitter, quality-of-service guarantees to enable successful VoIP services that are easy to deploy.
Traffic Prioritization
The first fundamental service for any mixed voice/data network is to prioritize voice traffic ahead of data traffic. With SkyPilot's robust traffic management , network administrators have a variety of traffic prioritization mechanisms to ensure latency-sensitive traffic is given end-to-end prioritization throughout the network. With multiple queues on every SkyPilot device, voice traffic can be ensured priority ahead of data traffic and hence provide the first step to ensuring QoS.
Deterministic Protocol
The second part of guaranteeing QoS is to ensure the applications' low-latency and low-jitter requirements are met. To meet this need, SkyPilot developed a unique Synchronous Mesh Protocol that is inherently deterministic and provides the low-latency and low-jitter that QoS-applications like VoIP require. The Synchronous Mesh Protocol uses a time-division duplex (TDD) bandwidth scheduling system to provide guaranteed throughput to take advantage of SkyPilot's low-latency and low-jitter characteristics.
Low-Latency
When the Synchronous Mesh Protocol is applied to high-priority traffic, SkyPilot reduces per-hop latency to 8-10 ms. Not only is this well below the 50 ms threshold required for VoIP traffic, but it also means that up to 5 hops can be built between the subscriber and the base station while still staying within the stringent VoIP constraints.
Low-Jitter
Due to SkyPilot's deterministic Synchronous Mesh Protocol, jitter is kept extremely low at 2-3 ms for high-priority traffic, thus ensuring latency-sensitive timing constraints are met.
Traffic Prioritization + Deterministic Protocol = Guaranteed QoS
With SkyPilot ability to prioritize latency-sensitive traffic and apply a deterministic protocol to this traffic, applications like VoIP are given the end-to-end traffic guarantees they need to be able to run successfully.