Realize VoIP Newsletter, April 2009

If you wish to subscribe or see other issues of our newsletter, you are invited to visit our Realize VoIP Newsletter homepage.

In This Issue

Message from the General Manager

By Avishai Sharlin

I'm happy to reinstitute RADVISION's bi-monthly newsletter, which will present the latest updates about the V²oIP industry, standards and RADVISION's products and activities, as well as a wide selection of technical articles that we believe you will find valuable. I am also excited about our new Developer Community, a new vehicle to engage customers and colleagues in fruitful open dialogue and collaboration. Enjoy!

Editor's Note

By Amir Zmora, VP Marketing

This first issue of our "renewed" newsletter features new and exciting articles as well as important announcements, such as the launch of our Developer Community. This new community is designed for anyone and everyone interested in multimedia Voice and Video over IP communication, including developers, CTOs, Product Managers, analysts and journalists. This is THE place for you to engage and collaborate with people who share your interests and enhance the ability to communicate with us and your industry peers.

The newsletter features two interesting articles about SIP video standards and all the different flavors of SIP. These articles remind me of the early days of SIP, before RFC 3261, when video was barely supported and interoperability was a real nightmare - with new releases of the protocol standardization released very often, and no one seemed to consider backward compatibility. We've come a long way since then and today, with the maturity and status of SIP, we can laugh about those days and enjoy the current maturity of the protocol. Yet there are still many challenges ahead and RADVISION remains deeply involved in both interoperability activities and video standardization.

The newsletter also covers product updates, news, blog posts highlights and other recent activities. One of the exciting news releases you will find inside is the introduction of our BEEHD product. This solution allows developers to introduce High Definition Video Communication clients to the market quickly - and at a fraction of the cost.

We trust you will find this newsletter valuable and enjoyable. We look forward to presenting you with more exciting news and information in upcoming issues.

The Many Faces of SIP

By Sagi Subocki, Product Manager

If you have been following the development of the SIP protocol over the past several years, you know that SIP has many different flavors for many different networks. Today, if you need SIP, the first question to ask is "for what kind of network?"

SIP is being used in several such networks, such as:

IMS - It's no secret that RADVISION has a great IMS SIP stack. But IMS itself has been split into several different kinds of networks: mobile, fixed and cable. Each one has its own standardization organization - 3GPP, TISPAN and Packet Cable respectively. So first off --- we need a SIP for each of these.
AS SIP - federal agencies have their own set of specifications for SIP, known as AS SIP (Assured Services SIP). AS SIP is a set of requirements that deal with security, quality of service, resource prioritization and other issues that are relevant for defense and security related issues. These requirements are for networks and products deployed by the US government.
NTT Japan - NTT, the largest service provider in Japan has its own set of specifications for SIP. Although the differences between this and "standard" SIP are small, interoperability is an issue.

The Many Faces of SIP All of these networks need to address the challenges of NAT and firewall traversal. Today, most available solutions are SIP- and VoIP-aware NATs and firewalls. Standardization to remove the need for this awareness in NATs has produced several techniques, such as STUN and ICE. Today, these solve most NAT traversal issues and have become the standard solution for NAT traversal in SIP.

While SIP started as a simple protocol for managing sessions, it has grown to the point where it needs to support additional services. For this, a set of additional, complementary protocols have been specified by standard organizations. An example of these is the set of protocols required for presence and instant messaging:

SIMPLE, a piggyback protocol over SIP, providing presence and basic instant messaging capabilities
XDM, a standalone OMA protocol, enabling control of contact lists, necessary for presence and other services
MSRP, an IETF protocol, providing point-to-point instant messaging and file transfer capabilities

RADVISION's latest SIP Developer Suite, version 5.5, is a highly versatile development tool for building all types of SIP applications, over all types of "networks": IMS, AS SIP, NTT Japan and others. This new version was also optimized for multi-core machines.

You can learn more about the latest SIP Developer Suite in our Developer Community.

Product News and Updates

We had a busy first quarter here with a number of new product releases:

Hot off the press - the brand new BEEHD high definition video telephony engine suitable for developers of video terminals
A new SIP stack version, optimized for multi-core
An ICE stack - the newest member of our family of NAT Traversal toolkits
Responding to requests from our customers, the Advanced RTP stack has a brand new add-on: Adaptive Jitter Buffer
A new version of the H.323 stack now supports version 6 of the standard
A new 3G-324M stack version which improves interoperability with various handsets
eVident boasts a brand new user interface and a new analysis module
Our ProLab^TM SIP testing solution now supports IPv6 traffic.

The new versions above are available to customers under maintenance agreements.

Introducing the RADVISION Developer Community

By Tsahi Levent-Levi, Community Facilitator and Project Manager

It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of the RADVISION Developer Community. This new section of our corporate website provides a platform for users to engage RADVISION employees and other users in a dialogue to share ideas and knowledge about VoIP development.

The goal of the Developer Community is to assist VoIP developers in their daily work. The community features the following tools:

Glossary - an open Wiki-based glossary of VoIP related terms.
Documentation - complete online product documentation.
Code Samples - for all products on the community site. You can also upload your own samples so others can benefit from them.
Forums - to discuss a wide range of topics relating to RADVISION products as well as general issues.

RADVISION Developer Community (screenshot)

We invite you to join our Developer Community and see firsthand how it can assist you in your daily work. We would also like to hear your thoughts and get your feedback on this new initiative. It was designed and built for you and we do want you to feel comfortable in it!

Making Standards Practical: SIP Video

By Anatoli Levine, Regional Product Manager at RADVISION; President of the IMTC

Making Standards Practical: SIP Video Believe it or not, SIP is turning 10 this year! The IETF 74 meeting that took place in in San Francisco during the last week of March 2009 marked the 10^th anniversary of Session Initiation Protocol. Taking a look back, we can say that over the last 10 years, SIP has become a major Voice over IP standard, powering a myriad of interoperable systems and devices and leaving competing standards, like H.323, in the dust.

Now, with the emphasis on "Interoperable", do you think we can safely claim the same for Video over IP? Not really. Or to be more optimistic - maybe "not yet." A very substantial portion of interoperable and deployed video conferencing systems is still built on top of H.323 systems. H.323 still has a leg up when it comes to implementing advanced functionality required for a good real-time video communications experience, such as dual video, flow control and more. However, when it comes to crossing the boundaries of the enterprise, using H.323 becomes problematic. Most service provider and carrier networks are really built to carry SIP traffic. So where does it leave us real-time video zealots (and mere users too)?

Enter the IMTC ( International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium, www.imtc.org ), an industry group of more than 40 leading companies in the area of communications. For more than 15 years, IMTC focused on making video interoperable by conducting interoperability testing events and clearing up all issues with both the equipment developers and standard-defining organizations. Recently, IMTC formed the SIP Parity Activity Group, which has a charter to bring interoperability and feature set of SIP-based video-conferencing systems on par with H.323-based implementations - and to do whatever it takes to achieve it.

SIP Parity work is split in three directions, or subgroups. The first is working on issues relating to dual video (a.k.a picture-in-picture, or H.239 in H.323 world) implementations in SIP, using either BFCP and re-Invite mechanism. The second is working on the issues of flow control, fast update and bandwidth negation, which are all key to delivering a high quality video communications experience. This subgroup is sorting through a number of RFCs, such as RFC5168 or RFC5104, working to create parallels to mechanisms provided in H.245, a part of H.323. The final subgroup is analyzing security issues of SIP-based implementations in light of the widespread use of encrypted media streams in world of H.323.

The SIP Parity work has just started at the end of last year, and it is progressing quite well. This is being driven by industry experts participating in periodic conference calls. Practical tests (nothing measures success in engineering better than the ability to use the fruits of your labor, right?) is planned for the Fall of 2009, when all participants will get together for an interoperability testing event.

Does this mean that the world of real-time video will soon be powered by just one protocol? Well, for sure video will become more advanced and interoperable in SIP. However, the answer to the "one-protocol" question is still a resounding "No." More on this on another issue.

Blog Highlights

Enjoy this quick glance at some recent interesting blog posts our blog network:

Multi-core optimization: If you have been following this newsletter so far, you already know about the new version of the RADVISION SIP stack. This new version is optimized for multi-core. Ofer Goren writes about the optimization done for this new release.
Web collaboration: Working on a new collaboration product? Don't miss Sagee Ben-Zedeff's 10 commandments for collaboration software - and make sure to have these on your feature list.
Openness: People sometimes miss the distinction between open source and open standards. Tsahi Levent-Levi sheds light on on the difference between the two.

In the Press

Datang Mobile selected our IMS Express^TM product suite to develop a full IMS/NGN Core Network solution. You can learn more about the IMS suite of products on our website.
We just launched a new product: BEEHD - a high definition video telephony engine for developers in partnership with TI's DM6467 SoC. You can learn more about our BEEHD from our website.
Green Hills Software announced their partnership with RADVISION with support for the Integrity OS "out of the box" with no porting required from users. You can read more about our own experience with porting work on our blogs.

Webinars / Events

Customer Satisfaction Survey

Your opinion matters to us. If you are (or were) a RADVISION customer of any of our developer tools, we would appreciate if you would take our Customer Satisfaction Survey. It will take only a few minutes of your time and will assist us a great deal. As an incentive, 25 of the respondents who complete the survey will win a gift certificate for a shopping spree at amazon.com. So why wait? Take the survey now.

Past Webinar: Improving Video Quality in Your Network

While video deployment is experiencing a significant boom both in enterprise and carrier networks overall, the user experience does not always live up to expectations. In this Webinar, RADVISION experts discuss how to avoid pitfall through pre- and post-deployment network assessment of video quality. If you didn't participate in this webinar, you can now view it directly from the web. Registration is free.

If you wish to subscribe or see other issues of our newsletter, you are invited to visit our Realize VoIP Newsletter homepage.