Realize VoIP Newsletter, October 2009

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In This Issue

• Editor's Note
• Why Do We Need Multiprotocol Video Terminals?
• 5 Steps for Multi-Protocol Client Development
• SIP and H.323 is an IMS World
• Product News and Updates
• Blog Highlights
• Webinars / Events
• In Closing

Editor's Note

By Amir Zmora, VP Marketing

We are glad to release this new issue of our newsletter this time focusing on multi-protocol support.

Even though the "protocol war" ended a long time ago and we see SIP as the protocol of choice for new deployments and developments, H.323 is still quite common in the network and is used intensively in video conferencing. The obvious solution for multi-protocol support would be through a gateway or SBC that bridges the signaling of these 2 protocols. Our CTO, Sasha Ruditsky, gives his thoughts on the subject favoring moving this logic into the client. In this context Amit Lavi, Product Manager of our client product line, explains the steps required for developing a multi-protocol HD video device. Sagi Subocki, Product Manager responsible for our SIP suite and IMS products, discusses adoption of IMS and multi-protocol support in this space. In this issue we announce a new product enhancing our SIP Developer Suite, the MSRP Stack. This new product release demonstrates our continuing long term commitment to providing our customers with the latest technology and features for keeping their products current and innovative.

I would like to draw the attention of our Israeli readers to the RADVISION yearly seminar in Israel that has become the gathering of the Israeli VoIP developer community. Don't stay behind! Join us for this free event focusing on Unified Communication and learn how your products can tap into this market as well. Due to an unexpected large number of registrants we have changed the date of this event as we had to move to a larger venue. Seats are limited so please hurry up and register, registrations are accepted on first comes first served basis.

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Why Do We Need Multiprotocol Video Terminals?

By Sasha Ruditsky, CTO

While just a few years ago it was quite clear that a videoconference terminal was an H.323 terminal, today we find ourselves in a world where a number of SIP videoconference terminals are present. SIP is newer, promises a bright future and is gradually being adopted. As a result, a network with existing H.323 videoconference equipment starts to be populated with SIP based newcomers.

However, as we all know, SIP and H.323 terminals do not interwork. Well, at least, they cannot do this directly. One potential solution to this problem is to introduce a new network device which performs the interworking function between the SIP and H.323 worlds, known as a gateway.

Such a gateway solution does work in simple scenarios; however, it has several limitations:

1. Any additional component on path between communicating devices creates a potential of interoperability problems. Due to the fact that almost every protocol element needs to be understood to be translated properly between the protocols, interworking gateways are especially prone to these kinds of problems.
2. Any additional component on the path between communicating devices also adds latency and delay, something that video terminals are very sensitive to.
3. As the protocol definition progresses, which is still happening at least on the SIP side, the terminals normally get updated faster than the corresponding network equipment.  As a result, new features implemented in the terminals cannot be used for inter-protocol calls.

It should be also mentioned, that often H.323 and SIP implement the same feature in really different ways (data collaboration in video conferencing is a good example). Adequate translation between the protocols in such cases may be cumbersome or simply impossible.

All these facts lead us to the idea that instead of translating between the protocols in the middle, there is an advantage to natively supporting them with the new videoconference terminals.

Implementing H.323 natively in the terminal is the only way to take full advantage of these protocol features, such as dual video and presentation control. Due to the fact that H.323 is generally stable and does not change much, the addition of H.323 support should not create significant overhead in terminal development and maintenance.

On the other hand, implementing SIP natively in the video terminal provides means to follow still adjusting SIP definitions. Areas of SIP related to video, such as dual video and far end camera control, are still under development. The standard continues to change and SIP devices need to be updated accordingly.

Multiprotocol terminals provide ability to communicate with both H.323 and SIP worlds without interoperability problems and without changing existing infrastructure. It is possible to argue that similar capability could be achieved by having two independent terminals, one for H.323 and the other one for SIP calls. However, in addition to being cost prohibitive and to obvious space requirements, it would prevent users from having one address book with contacts from both protocols, one set of media settings for H.323 and SIP calls and also will complicate the management of user's presence status.

With relatively minor additional development expenses, a videoconference device supporting both protocols would cover most of the video communication needs of the enterprise environment and would bring us closer to the dream of Unified Communication.

5 Steps For Multi-Protocol Development

By Amit Lavi, Product Manager

Supporting both SIP and H.323 in a videophone is important for any vendor and solution out there. RADVISION's BEEHD videophone framework provides SIP and H.323 support for endpoints as part of the many other features it comes with.. While I can start arguing how our BEEHD offloads man years of development effort, I chose to take a different approach and explain what is left for developers to do when looking for an embedded HD interactive video endpoint solution.

Step 1: Define Your Endpoint Client

First you should clearly define what kind of end-point client you wish to have (SD or HD and embedded or desktop) as these are decisions you will need to address immediately.

Step 2: Focus On Your Dialing Code and Address Book

One of the rare places where you will need to address the issues of supporting multiple protocols on your videophone endpoint would be the dialing procedure. When you dial out you need to determine if it should be using either SIP or H.323.

My suggestion? If you wish to dial using a specific protocol, just state so in your dialing string.

Step 3: Make Sure To Configure Both Protocols

Don't forget to set the relevant parameters for both protocols in the configuration. For H.323 these would be the gatekeeper information as well as your own terminal's H.323 addressing; and for SIP these would be the SIP proxy address as well as your UA's data.

Step 4: Find Servers For SIP and H.323

Next on your list would be to find some servers to register to, just to see how things are going. You will need to validate that your end product actually works as advertised. Don't skip this step - although you don't need to know everything about SIP and H.323, you should still be able to deal with such issues in the future, especially when customers will have some communication problems. So better start early.

Step 5: Take it For a Test Drive

Multi-protocol support needs rigorous testing for interoperability with other vendors products. There are areas where the application should take responsibility of what is going on - wrongful use of the APIs is something you want to test against. Make sure that your testing team also deals with some basic interoperability testing at the very least.

So why getting our BEEHD

BEEHD is targeted at developers who are looking for a complete signaling/media solution that is interoperable with both SIP and H.323 at the same time. As such, it will remove most of the headaches that occur from integration and interoperability with other systems. If you are developing a videophone client, then our BEEHD family and its various flavors allows you to addresses SD or HD, embedded or desktop.

SIP and H.323 in an IMS World

By Sagi Subocki, Product Manager

About ten years ago, delivering Voice over IP was the goal and the dream for countless startups, yet, today Voice over IP is an ubiquitous offering - up to the point where people in our industry think that VoIP as a term should become extinct. We've come a long way as an industry (despite the rather short time-span).

The standardized way to do VoIP has been H.323, which can now be found in new deployments mostly in the realm of enterprise video conferencing. In the past several years, there has been a migration towards SIP for anything VoIP. Add to that the latest rumors of Skype warming up to SIP with a possible acquisition of Gizmo5 and you have the winning standard in VoIP: SIP.

But now that VoIP is becoming mainstream and is being adopted by service providers worldwide, there is a need for another roadmap change for VoIP developers - a change that will not skip VoIP Client developers. This change is the migration to the world of IMS.

While operators are adopting SIP, they will be doing so in an IMS architecture - where they can manage the services they deploy in a flexible and standardized way. It seems like a decision has been made: the way to the future in all access networks is IMS based. A recent Infonetics Research Survey IMS Plans: Global Service Provider Survey, shows that 80% of Infonetics' service provider respondents run fixed voice over IMS today or will by 2011.

And this is not limited to the cellular industry:

• Cellular with 3GPP/3GPP2 which started the whole IMS revolution, with the migration to LTE making IMS imminent
• Fixed line and wireless have opted for IMS through the specifications of TISPAN
• The Cable industry is adopting IMS in their latest PacketCable 2.0 specification
• WiMAX may also end up using IMS as its services architecture

If you are still not convinced, I urge you to look at Christophe Gourraud's list of IMS deployments - a real eye opener.

All these adopt what is now called "common IMS", which defines a wide basic set of IMS standards which are identical to all networks, and in addition to the common IMS requirements, each access network has its own unique "flavor" added on top of it.

What does that mean to VoIP Clients? You need to have a roadmap towards IMS. While you might not be needing it today, the moment service providers roll out their commercial IMS networks - it will become a mandatory request.

While you're planning your roadmap towards IMS, may I suggest looking at our IMS Developer Suite? You will find there all the building blocks you need for your development.

Product News and Updates

Here with a number of new product releases:

We have a new product: MSRP. MSRP is a Protocol enabling point to point messaging and file transfers and handles messages as media. It is part of the SIMPLE OMA standard and allows transmission of the different media content for instant messaging scenarios. It is a part of our SIP Developer Suite and brings another important building block for developing IMS compliant products.

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

Blog Highlights

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

• Design: Ran Arad on our internal debates of SDK versus application.
• Video Conferencing: Sasha Ruditsky gives a much needed overview on data collaboration in video conferencing.
• Resources: Tsahi Levent-Levi decided to publish his own reading list of VoIP blogs.

Here are two more posts that have interested our readers in the past two months:

• Mobile VoIP is making waves in our industry lately. Tsahi Levent-Levi decided to write why Mobile VoIP is more hype than reality - for now.
• The video conferencing arena is in the headlines lately. Sagee Ben-Zedeff believes that for the industry to grow, there should be a $100 video endpoint.

Webinars / Events

Where and When?

Meet RADVISION and attend our panel

Supercomm is a great place to meet innovative companies and learn about new applications and services in the communication and broadband fields. The RADVISION team will be there and will be happy to meet with you, discuss your vision and needs and update you on our new products and plans. Please drop us a note if you are there. While you are at Supercomm we would like to invite you to hear Anatoli Levin, Director of Product Management, Americas, on October 21st at 3:10pm speaking on the panel "IP Video and its Impact on Healthcare" about the big promise and the challenges of IP Video communications for the healthcare industry. The panel will take place in room W183c at McCormick Place.

Webinar: Carrier Grade IMS Developer Solutions from Core Network Infrastructure to Endpoint Devices

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 10:00 AM EDT / 15:00 PM London / 16:00 Paris/Berlin

This web seminar reviews the challenges and opportunities of the development of next generation network elements. Speakers will discuss software building blocks, from the carrier grade open platform foundation to the underlying IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) for building infrastructure and endpoint devices.

Join our webinar to gain insight on a development trend to improve time-to-market through the adoption of a scalable common platform for multiple network elements.
(Presented jointly by RADVISION and Wind River)

Seminar: Unified Communication Technology and Trends

RADVISION will hold its annual customer seminar at the Daniel Hotel convention hall in Herzlia, Israel on November 17. The seminar will feature a gathering of the Israeli VoIP Community and will focus this year on Unified Communication Technology and Trends.

We invite you to attend lectures, experience exciting live demos and panels of industry VoIP experts, discussing: 

• Interactive high definition video
• Presence and instant messaging
• IMS
• IP/PBX development and latest advancements

Webinar: SIP Beyond Telecom

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:00 AM EDT / 15:00 PM London / 16:00 Paris/Berlin

SIP as an extensible protocol and with the general event-notification mechanism defined in RFC3265 as well as other activities in the IETF can be used for many purposes other than pure voice and video communications

Join our webinar to learn how SIP can be utilized for non-telecom applications in varying industries and segments such as transportation, cars and medical.

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 complete our Customer Satisfaction Survey. It will only take a few minutes of your time and would help us a great deal. We will be leaving this survey open for you to fill in at your own leisure, but why wait? Take the survey now.

Past Webinar: HD Video Conferencing to the Masses

High Definition video has become standard in most venues of media, yet it is still uncommon in video communications. Though the necessary technology is available, the complexity and cost of building an HD video solution is substantial. In RADVISION's online Webinar, you can learn how the RADVISION BEEHD offers the framework for developing economical HD video communication products while bypassing existing challenges. You are invited to register and view the Webinar online.

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 pitfalls 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.

In Closing

This newsletter aims to be useful to you. If you are not finding any value, PLEASE REPLY and tell us how we can improve. For more information from RADVISION, you are invited to follow the links below:

• Read our blogs: http://blog.radvision.com
• Join our community: http://developer.radvision.com

Thanks for reading our newsletter!

RADVISION's Developer Community Team

http://www.radvision.com