TMCnews Featured Article

July 27, 2007

Distributed Architecture for VoIP Telephony

By Spencer D. Chin, TMCnet Web Editor

As the initial reservations about voice quality, security and reliability fade away, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP

) is fast becoming a cornerstone of next generation, enterprise level voice-based applications and telco services. Residential VoIP is experiencing a fast market penetration and has ceased to be a novel phenomenon, and corporations are looking for better ways to leverage VoIP in next generation designs.

But according to a White Paper from Aculab (News - Alert) titled “Distributed architecture for VoIP telephony solutions,” the VoIP trend brings a new set of challenges, with many tough choices to be made.

Authored by Aculab product manager Herman Abel, the White Paper (News - Alert) noted that the complexity of voice solutions is on the increase and contemporary applications are hardly reminiscent of those just a few years ago. VoIP and SIP are not optional any more, but ‘must haves’, while comprehensive support for the PSTN and SS7

is still needed. Second, marketing specifications are becoming even more demanding, with the need to reduce costs. Low price per channel, total cost of ownership, CAPEX, OPEX (News - Alert) — this terminology suggests the key theme of requirements documents.

Given such stringent requirements, traditional voice-based solution architectures pose limitations to developers requiring increasingly sophisticated solutions, the paper points out. Implementation of redundancy and making the system fault tolerant is technically cumbersome and almost doubles capital expenditures. Remote system management, hitless software upgrades, and hardware maintenance without service interruptions add to the comprehensive list of system requirements that increase architectural complexity and spirals the cost of solutions utilizing traditional architectures.

Fortunately, systems designers have a better solution: a distributed architecture, according to Aculab. Distributed architecture offers scalability, redundancy, remote management and high service continuity at a minimal added cost. It utilizes the inherent strength of IP

to allow remote devices to communicate distantly and operate as if they were all present locally. Distributed architecture is an adoption of distributed computing practices used for several decades.

The White Paper details a solution for a VoIP distributed architecture solution that is less expensive than a traditional solution and provides a rapid return on investment. Such a solution can use standard hardware yet achieve telco-grade reliability and service continuity.

In addition, the paper describes how Aculab’s application development platforms, particularly the Prosody X line of DSP-based media processing platforms, can help developers of VoIP and PSTN

telephony solutions create cost-effective, high-performance distributed architectures for VoIP applications.

For more information, visit Aculab’s website.

Spencer Chin is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Don't forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users.

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