Sunday, April 29, 2007

SOVoIP: A New VoIP Architecture

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is one of the most prominent communications technologies today. Consumers are already taking advantage of this cost effective solution for telephony over the Internet. The introduction of VoIP has resulted in a number of VoIP specific protocols that are not interoperable. Thus the next logical step is to make these and other existing protocols on the Internet talk to each other to bring about true convergence between voice and data networks. Naturally middleware that connects different software, platforms and protocols comes into the picture. Thus, in the research lab of The University of Melbourne, Australia, we have introduced a service oriented architecture for VoIP, Service Oriented VoIP (SOVoIP), which ensures protocol convergence while addressing many critical issues related to VoIP such as: Quality of Service (QoS), Enhanced 911 (E911), Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), NAT and firewall traversal. Comparative results endorse SOVoIP over the existing VoIP architectures.

We are going to present our first research paper in the 16th International World Wide Web Conference. You can have a look at our paper for more here.

Dave Greenfield, editor of VoIP Line and Network Computing on 26th of April, 2007 in his editor's note wrote about SOVoIP:

EDITOR'S NOTE:
Is There VoIP After SIP?


A new paper being presented at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference next month will be the first presentation on a fully blown out Web service-based telephony architecture or what I've been calling a Service Oriented Telephony Architecture (SOTA).

We've talked about SOTA as the next wave in VoIP. The combination of VoIP with Web service portability and component reuse make SOTA a compelling alternative to current VoIP approaches. Most SOTAs, such as those from Avaya or BlueNote, use some SIP process or server and don't reference any sort of standardized architecture.

This paper gets rid of the SIP infrastructure completely. It relies on SOAP to transport the telephony signaling and RTP to still carry the VoIP content. This means that the architecture should avoid the SIP's difficulties around NAT traversal not to mention its complexity.

Sure, the paper has a long way to go before its authors -- Mohammed Jubaer Arif, Shanika Karunasekera, and Santosh Kulkarni -- can present it to a standard's body. It's got an even longer way after that before it has the sophistication and breadth of SIP. But if you want a picture of where VoIP is headed take a gander at this document.

- Dave Greenfield
Editor, VoIP Line
Editor, Network Computing