VoIP is being increasingly deployed by enterprise IT departments as a cost-effective replacement for PBX-based telephone networks. The single biggest advantage of deploying VoIP is that IT administrators have to maintain just one kind of network for both data and voice applications resulting in significant cost savings. Moreover, the quality of VoIP calls has improved significantly over the past few years as voice quality-related issues have been addressed in data networks as well as in VoIP devices. VoIP is also gaining popularity in the consumer space, in homes and Wi-Fi public hotspots like hotels, airports, and coffee shops.

The popularity of WLANs has tremendously increased among notebook users with ubiquitous Wi-Fi deployments in enterprise networks and popular places like airports, hotels, and coffee shops. Enterprises of all sizes are adopting WLANs as connectivity extensions of their corporate network beyond office spaces and cubicles, or in some cases as a replacement for the wired network.

As VoIP and WLAN deployments continue to gain momentum in the enterprise, VoIP usage over WLAN is also expected to gain popularity, especially among notebook users with softphone applications. Supporting adequate quality for VoIP over WLAN has some unique challenges arising from the characteristics of WLANs. Typically, the bandwidth available over a WLAN is an order of magnitude less than that available over a wired LAN. Moreover, a WLAN signal is susceptible to interference from adjacent WLANs as well as other radio devices. This causes increased delays and sometimes losses for packets transmitted over WLAN. Another big challenge is that of Quality of Service (QoS) for VoIP traffic. Intel's Seamless Collaboration architecture, described in this paper, addresses WLAN QoS challenges and introduces other platform technology ingredients to improve the VoIP experience on Intel^® Centrino^® mobile technology notebooks.

In this paper, we first provide an overview of Intel Centrino 2006 Seamless Collaboration scenarios. We then describe the network topology and landscape for VoIP and its deployment challenges in enterprise networks, and for VoIP QoS over wired and wireless networks. In the following sections, we present Intel's QoS architecture for VoIP over WLAN, and we describe the Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (IPPs) that are available for softphone optimization. We then provide an overview of Intel's Array Microphone architecture and Bluetooth*-Wireless Coexistence solution for Bluetooth headset enabling.