The telecommunications industry is shifting its focus away from traditional fixed networks and into mobile and broadband telephony. The broadband market is currently small but growing at rapid pace due to widespread broadband access and competitive pricing. It is predicted that this growth will continue and broadband will become a mainstream telephony medium.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is the standard protocol for transmitting voice over broadband networks. VoIP has specific monitoring and management needs. As a real time application its network needs are more demanding than data, latency, packet loss and delay must be carefully managed to provide acceptable QoS. Additionally telephony has many metrics and features which need to be conveyed effectively and efficiently. The telephony service and the underlying network must be managed side by side.
Current VoIP management solutions are generally propriety and require administrators to have specific knowledge of VoIP technologies. Most solutions condense information into tables and 2D graphs. We have recognised a gap in the market for a management tool which has high usability and communicates large volumes of complex data efficiently and effectively. Research has suggested that representing information in a visual 3D format is useful in certain scenarios. We aim to investigate this usefulness for VoIP management.
We propose to develop a unique monitoring and management system for VoIP called LAMS. LAMS will generate a 3D virtual world which reflects in real time an operational VoIP telephony system. Objects and concepts in the telephony system will be represented by objects in the virtual world. Telephony and network metrics will be mapped to visual characteristics of the virtual objects. For example the bandwidth being consumed by a VoIP server may be communicated through the colour of its virtual counter-part. In this way critical information is communicated to the user instantly. LAMS users will be immersed in the fully interactive virtual world. Actions performed on the virtual objects will invoke actions on the real world system.
We will create a working prototype of LAMS which will monitor a small IP PBX under lab conditions. A subset of critical network and telephony metrics will be represented in the prototype, and a few main management tasks may be executed.
LAMS will use L3DGEWorld, an open source 3D visualisation utility to create the virtual environment. Our test IP-PBX which LAMS will manage will be created through minimum specification hardware and open source telephony package Asterisk. We will write scripts which extract data from Asterisk servers and convert it into a format L3DGEWorld display. We will create 3D models and maps which best represent the telephony servers and the context of the telephony network. The role of the prototype is to demonstrate the potential of LAMS as a monitoring and management system for VoIP. We will investigate the prototype for its effectiveness and efficiency in monitoring VoIP and its impact on the telephony network.
