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IP Video for SMB Market & VOIP solutions

Abstract

Enduring pressure to keep costs down and constant interaction with various business units have become inevitable for the survival of a company in today’s business environment. Before we move on to understand the ever so increasing dependability on IP Video, let’s assume that a company has ten locations and wishes to have a corporate meeting. The cost to fly two people from each of the ten locations at an average of $250 per ticket rings up a total of $5000. Add rooms for 20 people, meals while on road and one can quickly see that less cost alternatives become mainstream.

Technological advancement in the recent times, especially in the areas of video codecs, video on demand (VOD), digitized video, interactive video, streaming video and real time audio/video, has helped to make a mature and reliable product out of the erstwhile video conferencing.

Considering the cost effectiveness and accessibility, various research reports related to Video IP, assumes multifold growth in the market by year 2013. A recent article in Business Week states that Unified Communication alone will reach $4.3 Billion industry by 2013. Is Video IP the next killer technology? It definitely appears to be.

This paper examines the potential for IP based Video Communication Market, the challenges of implementation and existing /upcoming solutions. It also covers introduction to some Video IP solution components and their implementation.

Introduction

Potential for IP Video market

In this global economy, business networks are spread far and in multiple places. A face-to-face interaction has always been valued higher in business world. Customers, vendors, business partners and development facilities may be spread across the globe. Although travel may be the preferred method, the financial, environmental and physiological cost of air travel is making companies look for alternatives. At least large percentage of routine or regular business trips can be eliminated with video over IP. Increasing face-to-face communication using video IP across dispersed workforces and teams can also increase productivity. Eventually all these various factors are leading to huge potential for IP Video market in near future.

Historical Background

Need for Tele-video was recognized long time ago. AT & T first developed video phone in 1964, but the technology available then had made it expensive and inefficient. Arrival of IP was the first major breakthrough that allowed Tele-video, a viable solution. But it still remained affordable only for a few fortune 500 companies. Lack of bandwidth, high cost of equipment and unreliable IP infrastructure made it expensive for many and poor quality, unreliable connection, difficulty in configuring and lack of required features made users think twice before implementing it. But now with strong high bandwidth and reliable IP communication infrastructure, the hope for new wave of Video over IP communication has revived.

Recent Developments

Recent advancements in technology now allow video communication over IP a possibility, not just for Fortune 500 companies, but also for SMBs. The time is ripe for Video over IP to take center stage.

Some of these technological advancements are:

Service providers and manufacturers use video IP technology in various different forms to provide a business solution. Video IP is used in various applications or can be bundled with other features based on market specific requirements. Few such examples are: Unified Communication, Video IP phone, Videoconferencing and Telepresence. Not to mention IPTV and video on mobile phones.

This document specifically discusses implementing video conferencing but can be basis for other applications as well. It may be worthwhile to understand the definition of these different applications to see how video IP plays an important role in realizing all these technologies.

Implementation of Video IP Communications

H.323 & Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

The most common way to implement Videoconferencing is using H.323 protocol. A popular alternative approach is using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). While H.323 is widely implemented by video conferencing equipment manufacturers currently, SIP is gaining momentum, at least for end devices.

Having said so, the two protocols are quiet comparable in terms of their functionality, Quality of Service (QoS), Scalability, Feasibility, Interoperability and Ease of Implementation. This happened because, over their existence, both H.323 and SIP have improved themselves by learning from each other and the differences between them are diminishing with each new version.

INFRASTRUCTURE AND SOLUTIONS

For videoconferencing to work, a collection of equipment is needed in both H.323 and SIP.

Video entities are:

(The focus of this paper will be on simple video conferencing that does not require codec conversion, multi party conferencing and non IP based networks)

H.323 NETWORK DIAGRAM

KEY POINTS

Few other key points to be considered while building a video conferencing device are:

Many software components are nowadays available as open source, such as operating systems (Linux) and protocol such as SIP (Open SIP, pSIP, xSIP) and H.323 (openh323, h323plus).

Challenges for Video IP Solutions

Key challenges in building video conferencing equipment are managing bandwidth hungry applications, Infrastructural Challenges, Quality of Service, Ease of use and Inter-operability with other vendors and service providers.

BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT

The burden that video conferencing will put on the infrastructure will vary according to the usage, but the bandwidth demand will definitely increase. This is addressed to a certain extend by the technological advancement in the area of video codec, which has resulted in highly compressed video streams generated by codec such as MPEG-4, VP6 series etc. Other network based approaches such as “Quantity of Service”, which simply allocates sufficient bandwidth to video carrying traffic so that it will not get congested under any possible load pattern, and reduction in frame rate or resolution helps in addressing the challenge effectively. Well planned and installed infrastructure system such as 10G ip can also ensure that the bandwidth requirements are met.

INFRASTRUCTURE & QUALITY

Success of videoconferencing depends upon quality of video. While some glitch in audio can be tolerable, glitch in video can be annoying. Minimum requirement is to provide smooth continuous video synchronized with voice. Hence video and audio quality has to be of highest priority. The quality of videoconferencing directly depends on IP network. A well designed IP network can insure minimal packet loss and delay. Most professional devices sometimes use forward error correction to ensure that the encoded video stream can be reconstructed even if some packets are lost, which addresses the fact that resending packets are not an option in video transmission considering the sequential nature of the underlying signal. Other important IP related issues are NAT traversing, firewall traversing, routing and security. To solve these problems a good understanding of IP networking, IP protocols and IP security is inevitable.

USABILITY & INTER-OPERABILITY

A user expects a simple and intuitive way of configuring network and initiating a conference. Big companies can afford to invest in dedicated resources to configure, adjust and maintain videoconferencing network and devices. But the small and medium businesses may not. The challenge here is to provide simple yet effective network configuration and intuitive way of initiating a conference. Besides logical design one can take advantage of technologies that has become inexpensive such as touchscreen.

If the goal is to make videoconferencing accessible to SMB then the videoconferencing entities (i.e. endpoint) has to be able to support various protocols & codec and be able to inter-operate with other vendors and various service providers. Wider inter-operability can be ensured by undertaking thorough testing. Besides functional testing, performance testing and video/audio quality testing, intensive inter-operability testing is suggested.

AREA OF EXPERTISE REQUIREMENTS

In summary, to build a videoconferencing device focusing the SMB segment the following expertise are needed:

Calsoft Expertise

Technology Expertise

Calsoft has deep experience with designing and implementing Video IP solutions. Calsoft’s expertise in various protocols such as H.323, SIP, MGCP, RTP, RTCP, TCP/IP etc and proven hardware design capabilities of its subsidiary, Aspire communications, together offers a unique capability to execute and deliver state-of-the-art Video IP technology projects. The expertise includes hardware and software design, implementation, interoperability testing, performance testing, product certification testing etc.

Product Engineering Services

Together with the relevant expertise, Calsoft offers various engagement models that allow customers to leverage Calsoft’s capabilities to stay competitive and cost effective in a very dynamic marketplace.

The models include:

Calsoft’s VoIP lab and other networking lab infrastructure are fully equipped with various product development and test equipments. In the past, customers have entrusted Calsoft team with complete analysis, design, implementation and testing of IP Video & VOIP solutions, while many have leveraged Calsoft’s expertise to fill gaps by entrusting them to enhance their product or perform various product testing.

Example Project & Case Studies: