A Voice over IP Network

Alexandru Juncu

1.Introduction

Voice over IP

IP Telephony

or most often referred as

VoIP

is the attempt tounite the old telephony system with the data network in what is know as a convergednetwork. It is a very daring attempt because of the implications that are technological,financial and even sociological. It is a rather new concept and still in it’s developmentinfancy, but it has a huge potential for the future.Why would we need it? Although we all are used to the old telephone system,voice over IP, will make things much simple. The cost for a telephone call will bereduced dramatically but the quality will increase, the administration will be much simpleand we will have a new way perspective on a simple phone.

2.Components of a VoIP network

When thinking of a VoIP network we need to consider a large number of components. These components can be

•

Hardware components

( end devices, interconnecting devices, core devices)

•

Applications

(server software, client software, administration software )

•

Protocols

(the way components communicate with each other)All these components have to be taken into consideration to make the network work. There is a large number options to choose from for each component so it best fitsthe need of the end users.

The

end devices

are the phones. Theycan either be pure

IP Phones

that are physicaldevices similar to plain phones (but with moreadvances features ) that understated the VoIP protocols and directly connect to the VoIPnetwork or plain old phones that onlyunderstand analog signals and connect to theIP network through an interconnecting device(called

ATA

). The difference is that IP Phonesuse protocols like IP, TCP, UDP and VoIP protocols (like SIP, H323, RTP) while normal phones only understand analog signals.The end devices can also be so

Softphones

that are applications thatrun inside a PC’s operating system.Because this type of device only needsthe software part the choices are vast.They are the cheapest option of an enddevice (most of the time is free).The interconnecting devices arethe usually the same as in a typicalnetwork (routers, switches, access points) to witch we can add devicessuch as ATAs.An important part of the VoIP network are the

voice servers.

They connect andmanage the other devices and control all of the voice traffic. They are actuallyapplications (and here too we have a large number of choices) that run inside of dedicated computer server or routers or dedicated devices. The job of the voice server isto be aware of the whole network so they can route calls that the end devices make. Hereis where all the call management takes place ( filtering, accounting, traking).The critical components of the voice network is the

protocol suite

. All VoIPnetwork run on top of the

Internet Protocol

that assures communication at the third layer of the OSI stack. This means that packet are routed inside the network(s) form sender toreceiver. The way packets are used is the job of the upper layers and the protocols of those layers. On top of IP, we have

UDP

(user datagram protocol). UDP is used and notTCP (that is much more reliable) because of it’s speed and low overhead. To fix theIP Phone (Cisco 7960)Softphone (XLite for Windows)

shortcomings of UDP,

RTP

(Real-time Transport Protocol) make the transmission of packets (this time voice or video packets) as reliable as TCP.Finally, on top of RTP we have all the VoIP protocols. Examples are

SIP

(SessionInitiation Protocol),

H323, SCCP, MGCP.

These protocols are responsible for establishing, controlling, administering and ending phone calls. Aside from these, wehave

Codecs

that represent the voice or video format. The quality of the audio streamand the bandwidth consumption depends on what and how codecs are used

. G.711

G.722

G.726

G.729

are

G.722

are the most used.

3.Designing and implementing a VoIP network

When designing a VoIP solution there are some things that you need to take intoconsideration. Current and needed infrastructure, number of users, budget, need featuresand even legal issues.First of all you need an

IP infrastructure

. This means that you have to have anetwork that can route IP packets. Most of this infrastructure represents equipment:

switches

(or hubs) for LAN connectivity,

routers

for WAN connectivity,

access points

for wireless capabilities and

cables

to connect these components. Also you also need toconsider things like

firewalls

(for security)

NAT servers

and DHCP servers

(for addressing management) and

user management servers

(such as LDAP or ActiveDirectory). It is important to have a “VoIP ready” infrastructure because this has animportant impact on

QoS

(quality of service) of the voice network QoS in a voice network means that you have to take care of some factors

•

Bandwidth –

the speed between devices

•

Delay –

the time a packet needs to reach the destination

•

Jitter

– the time between two packets

•

Packet loss –

number of packets that are lost in the transmissionThe bandwidth is proportional with the number of users and the codec used. If you have a large number of users you need a high bandwidth or use a codec that uses less bandwidth (but the quality of the sound will decrease).Delay is important because voice packets need to arrive in real-time. You don’twant to have moments of silence on your phone until you get a response from the other side. Rules say that you need to have a delay of maximum

150ms

.Because of the buffer delay in equipments, the packets arrive with a delay to eachother. This is called jitter. You don’t want jitter because, like in the case of delay, youhave real-time transmission and you don want words to arrive at the right time ( with nosilence time or overlapping streams).The worse case is that you have packets dropped on the way to the destination.This would mean that whole words would be lost from the conversation. This isunacceptable so the rule is that the maximum number of packets lost is 2% (2 for every100 packets sent). This is because a very small number of lost packets can be correctedusing some advanced predictions and correction methods.