VoIP performance management and optimization

See the book Adeel Ahmed, Habib Madani, and Talal Siddiqui. VoIP performance management and optimization: A KPI-based approach to managing and optimizing VoIP networks, Cisco Press, 2011 [Ahmed 2011]

This book uses key performance indicators (KPI) as metrics for managing and optimizing a VoIP system.

Figure 1-3 on page 9 of this book shows a set of voice quality issues and their potential causes. It further details these in Table 1-1 on page 15-17.

One of the features that Cisco’s IOS has introduced is IP Service Level Agreements (IP SLA) - this can both collection information and be used to create a loopback so that traffic can be generated on the leaves of the network (for load testing).

VoIP metrics have also been added to Cisco’s NetFlow version 9.

Slide Notes

Adeel Ahmed, Habib Madani, and Talal Siddiqui. VoIP performance management and optimization: A KPI-based approach to managing and optimizing VoIP networks. Indianapolis, IN: Cisco Press, 2011, 448 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-58705-528-7.

Transcript

[slide481] So for instance, according to the book by Ahmed, Madani, and Siddiqui on "VoIP performance management and optimization: a key performance indicator based approach to managing and optimizing VoIP networks" They talked about what are the key performance indicators, i.e. the metrics that you are going to use to be able to decide, is my VoIP system providing high quality or not? But one of the things they did is they implemented a way so that the VoIP terminal would get traffic and loop it back. It didn't actually have to have a human there to answer the call. I instead send the traffic there, simply take the traffic, couple it back, and now I can compute statistics on the actual quality of my channel without having to involve the users at all. This is a very, very clever thing, that I can collect data when there are no users even using the system. So it has no impact on my users, my users are very happy. And if there are problems, I can spot them early on.