Despite its popularity, relatively little is known about the traffic characteristics of the Skype VoIP system and how they differ from other P2P systems. We describe an experimental study of Skype VoIP traffic conducted over a five month period, where over 82 million datapoints were collected regarding the population of online clients, the number of supernodes, and their traffic characteristics. This data was collected from September 1, 2005 to January 14, 2006. Experiments on this data were done in a black-box manner, i.e., without knowing the internals or specifics of the Skype system or messages, as Skype encrypts all user traffic and signaling traffic payloads. The results indicate that although the structure of the Skype system appears to be similar to other P2P systems, particularly KaZaA, there are several significant differences in traffic. The number of active clients shows diurnal and work-week behavior, correlating with normal working hours regardless of geography. The population of supernodes in the system tends to be relatively stable; thus node churn, a significant concern in other systems, seems less problematic in Skype. The typical bandwidth load on a supernode is relatively low, even if the supernode is relaying VoIP traffic.

With the growth of IEEE 802.11-based wireless LANs, VoIP and similar applications are now commonly used over wireless networks. Mobile station performs a handoff whenever it moves out of the range of one access point (AP) and tries to connect to a different one. This takes a few hundred milliseconds, causing interruptions in VoIP sessions. We developed a new handoff procedure which reduces the MAC layer handoff latency, in most cases, to a level where VoIP communication becomes seamless. This new handoff procedure reduces the discovery phase using a selective scanning algorithm and a caching mechanism.