Implementing Voice and Video over IP for iPhones, Smartphones

A new whitepaper by Global IP Solutions (News - Alert) explains how applications can be VoIP enabled to take advantage of the unique capabilities of iPhones and smartphones.

 

The Apple iPhone (News - Alert) has created a lot of interest in applications for mobile voice and video over IP. However, mobile networks present challenges such as delay, packet loss and echo to developing high-quality VoIP and video applications, so it’s crucial that developers learn to deal with these limitations.

 

The whitepaper states how the convenience of mobile devices makes them ideally suited to deliver the next generation of applications for voice and video over IP. It says smartphones present the most promising opportunity for the growth of the mobile VoIP market, especially as solutions such as the iPhone are made available.

 

Providing VoIP on a mobile device is a challenge due to its small size, limited processing capabilities and short battery life. The quality of the connection also presents a challenge because mobile devices operate over wireless links with disturbances.

 

In addition to the traditional jitter problems found in mobile devices, smartphones like the iPhone introduce extra jitter when they need to simultaneously perform several tasks for the end user. There is also the problem of echo when using a microphone.

 

This demonstrates why having high-quality voice and video processing capabilities is so important. Because iPhone application developers are typically not audio or video experts, it is Global IP Solutions’ goal to deliver real-time IP multimedia communication to the iPhone developer community.

 

Global IP Solutions looks for solutions to problems such as packet loss, delay and jitter. To combat these issues, Global IP developed such innovative solutions as the iLBC (an IETF standard) and iSAC codecs, and its NetEQ jitter buffer.

 

In 2002, the company launched the first version of its voice processing package called VoiceEngine, which provides a complete package of VoIP sound processing that handles all of the voice processing complexity for application developers. Soon, the first prototype of VoiceEngine Mobile for Windows CE on the iPaq was developed.

 

It demonstrated high-quality VoIP over WiFi (News - Alert) with a mobile device. VoiceEngine has since been a popular product enabling such applications as Skype, Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, and has been available for the Mac OS. The history of VoiceEngine, as well as Global IP Solutions’ MAC experience, made porting VoiceEngine to the iPhone a natural step.

 

Global IP Solutions also offers a VideoEngine Mobile product, and as the iPhone APIs become more open, developers will soon be able to create real-time voice and video solutions for the iPhone. The requirements of smartphones and iPhone mean that VoiceEngine’s ability to handle network impairments and device limitations are even more important for the mobile environment.

 

VoiceEngine contains a highly-adaptive jitter buffer called NetEQ to manage the network impairments and additional jitter introduced on smartphones. NetEQ uses novel jitter handling methods as well as packet loss concealment techniques.

 

Finally, VoiceEngine utilizes advanced AEC and noise suppression solutions to minimize the effects of echo and background noise common in mobile environments. All of these capabilities were optimized specifically for the iPhone, making VoiceEngine the ideal solution for developers of mobile VoIP applications. For more information on Global IP Solutions or to view the whitepaper, please visit www.gipscorp.com