HT 2010, Period 1, IK2554 Practical Voice Over IP (VoIP): SIP and related protocols
(Röst över IP (VoIP) i praktiken: SIP och relaterade protokoll)

Last modified: Thu Apr 21 17:51:41 CEST 2011

Announcements

Initial version for 2010 - still under development

Other updates

Students who are not regularily enrolled at KTH can apply for the course by filling out an application form for "Kurser för fristående studerande" -- please bring this form with you to class - so that I can expedite its processing (since normally this application should be submitted in advance of the course.

IK2554 Practical Voice Over IP (VoIP): SIP and related protocols (Röst över IP (VoIP) i praktiken: SIP och relaterade protokoll) is a 7.5 point course designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students; especially those in the Telecommunication Graduate Program or the International Masters Wireless program.

Advanced undergraduates should have completed the course 2G1305/IK1550 (Internetworking) or 2G1701 (Advanced Internetworking) or an equivalent course and obtain permission of the instructor.

Aim

This course will give both practical and general knowledge concerning Voice over IP. The emphasis will be on the underlying protocols.

Learning Outcomes

Following this course a student should be able to:

Understand the relevant protocols (particularily SIP, SDP, RTP, and SRTP): what they are, how they can be used, and how they can be extended.
Enable you to utilize SIP in Presence and event-based communications
Understand how SIP can provide application-level mobility along with other forms of mobility
Understand how SIP can be used to facilitate communications access for users with disabilities (for example using real-time text, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text) and to know what the basic requirements are to provide such services
Understand SIP can be used as part of Internet-based emergency services and to know what the basic requirements are to provide such services
Contrast "peer-to-peer" voice over IP systems (i.e., how they differ, how they might scale, what are the peers, ...)
Know the relevant standards and specifications - both of the protocols and of the requirements (for example, concerning legal intecept)
Understand the key issues regarding quality-of-service and security
Evaluate existing voice over IP and other related services (including presence, mobile presence, location-aware, context-aware, and other service)
Design and evaluate new SIP based services
Read the current literature at the level of conference papers in this area.
- While you may not be able to understand all of the papers in journals, magazines, and conferences in this area - you should be able to read 90% or more of them and have good comprehension. In this area it is especially important that develop a habit of reading the journals, trade papers, etc. In addition, you should also be aware of both standardization activities, new products/services, and public policy in the area.
Demonstrate knowledge of this area both orally and in writing.
- By writing a paper suitable for submission to conferences and journals in the area.

This course should prepare you for starting an exjobb in this area (for undergraduate students) or beginning a thesis or dissertation (for graduate students).

Prerequisites

Telesys, gk or Datorkommunikation och datornät/Data and Computer Communications or equivalent knowledge in Computer Communications; Internetworking; or permission of the instructor

Students considering participating in this course should contact the instructor.

Contents

This course will focus on the protocls associate with Voice over IP. The course should give both practical and more general knowledge concerning the these protocols. One of the major aims of the course is that student should be able to build upon these protocols to enable new services.

The course consists of 10 hours of lectures and an assigned paper requiring roughly 50h of work by each student.

Topics

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP)
Real-time Streaming Protocol (RTSP)
Common Open Policy Server (COPS)
SIP User Agents
Location Server, Redirect Server, SIP Proxy Server, Registrar Server, ... , Provisioning Server, Feature Server
Call Processing Language (CPL)

Examination Requirements

An assigned paper requiring roughly 50-200h of work by each student (7.5 ECTS)
Registration: Monday 20 September 2010 at 23:59, to maguire@kth.se with the subject: IK2554 topic" giving:
- Group members, leader.
- Topic selected
Written report
- The length of the final report should be 10 pages (roughly 5,000 words) for each student; it should not be longer than 12 pages for each student - papers which are longer than 12 pages per student will be graded as "F".
- If there are multiple students in a project group, the report may be in the form of a collections of papers, with each paper suitable for submission to a conference or journal.
- Contribution by each member of the group - must be clear (in the case where the report is a collection of papers - the role of each member of the group can be explained in the overall introduction to the papers.
- The report should clearly describe: 1) what you have done; 2) who did what; if you have done some implementation and measurements you should describe the methods and tools used, along with the test or implementation results, and your analysis.
- Final Report: written report due Friday 15 October 2010 + oral presentations individually scheduled 21 and 22 October 2010.
- Send email with URL link to maguire@kth.se
- Late assignments will not be accepted
- Note that it is pemissible to start working well in advance of the deadlines!
- For graduate students the paper should be of the quality that it could be submitted to a conference - immediately following the course.
Oral presentations; Each group should present their results in 15 minutes or less. The presentation should not be more than 15 minutes, given the 20 minute timeslot this gives time for a couple questions and changing presenters. You only need to attend the day you present.

Grades

For new ECTS grading:

To get an "A" you need to write an outstanding or excellent paper and give an outstanding or excellent oral presentation. (Note that at least one of these needs to be excellent.)
To get a "B" you need to write a very good paper, i.e., it should be either a very good review or present a new idea; and you have to give a very good oral presentation.
To get a "C" you need to write a paper which shows that you understand the basic ideas underlying voice over IP and that you understand one (or more) particular aspects at the level of an average masters student. In addtion, you must be able to present the results of your paper in a clear, concise, and professional manner - and answer questions (as would be expected at a typical international conference in this area.)
To get a "D" you need to demonstrate that you understand the basic ideas underlying voice over IP, however, your depth of knowledge is shallow and you are unable to orally answer indepth questions on the topic of your paper.
If your paper has some errors (including incomplete references) or you are unable to answer any indepth questions following your oral presentation the grade will be an "E".
If your paper has serious errors or you are unable to answer basic questions following your oral presentation the grade will be an "F".
If your paper or oral presentation are close to passing, but not at the passing level, then you will be offered the opportunity for "komplettering", i.e., students whose written paper does not pass can submit a revised version of their paper (or a completely new paper) - which will be evaluated; similarly students whose oral presentation is unacceptable may be offered a second opportunity to give their oral presentation. If a student fails the second oral presentation, they must submit a new paper on a new topic in order to give an oral presentation on this new topic.

Code of Honor and Regulations

It is KTH policy that there is zero tolerance for cheating, plagiarism, etc. - for details see KTH startpage->Student->Student rights See also the KTH Ethics Policies

Suggestions when writing your report

For students who are looking for examples of papers - see the ACM Sigcomm 2005 proceedings - which are in the Computer Communication Review, Volume 35, Number 4, October 2005.
For your document, you should be sure to use A4 sized paper rather than US letter.
For those using LaTeX, you can improve the look of the document by:
- switching to using PostScipt fonts (instructions)
- You can also turn off hyphenation or at least limit its use with "\hyphenpenalty=5000 \tolerance=1000"

Some common flaws in reports (from other courses)

Incomplete references
Missing important citations
Statements made without justification or supporting citations
Poor (or no) editing
Failure to spell check the document
Documents which it is clear that no one looked at after formatting - often these have breaks in the middle of sentences, missing phrases, ... .
Using figures from others without the copyright owner's permission
Lack of page numbers
Unreadable text in figures
Failure to label elements of figures adequately
Use of contractions
Use of acronyms or abbreviations without properly introducing them; often failure to use these acroynms and abbreviations consistently through the rest of the paper
Redundant text
Using too few refences, often the paper looks like simply a cut and paste edit of these references.
Single sentence paragraphs
Lack of vertical white space between paragraphs, which in some cases makes it hard to understand where new paragraphs begin
Lack of a date - every document should have a date, in addition to title and author(s), and most references should have more information - keep in mind that the goal is to enable someone (perhaps even yourself) to find the reference at a later point in time
Sections and subsections are not numbered - hiding both the structure of the document and making cross references difficult

Literature

Main Text-Book

The course will mainly be based on the book: Henry Sinnreich and Alan B. Johnston, Internet Communications Using SIP: Delivering VoIP and Multimedia Services with Session Initiation Protocol, 2nd Edition, Wiley, August 2006, ISBN: 0-471-77657-2

Additional Reference Books

none - at the present time

Lecture notes are available on-line in PDF format. See the notes associated with each of the course topics.

Errata for Henry Sinnreich and Alan B. Johnston, Internet Communications Using SIP: Delivering VoIP and Multimedia Services with Session Initiation Protocol (note this is a work in progress)

Supplementary readings

John Alexander (Editor), Chris Pearce, Anne Smith, Delon Whetten, Cisco CallManager Fundamentals: A Cisco AVVID Solution Cisco Press, 2001, ISBN: 1-58705-008-0.
Gonzalo Camarillo and Jonathan Rosenberg, SIP Demystified McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing, 2001, ISBN: 0-07-137340-3.
Daniel Collins, Carrier Grade Voice Over IP McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing, 2000, ISBN: 0-07-136326-2.
Jonathan Davidson, James Peters, Brian Gracely (Contributor), Jim Peters, Voice over IP Fundamentals, Cisco Press, 2000, ISBN: 1-5787-0168-6.
Jonathan Davidson (Editor), Tina Fox (Editor), Phil Bailey (Editor)ConCon Deploying Cisco Voice Over IP Solutions, Cisco Press, 2001, ISBN: 1-58705-030-7.
Bill Douskalis, Putting VoIP to Work: Softswitch Network Design and Testing, Prentice Hall, 2002, ISBN 0-13-040959-6.
Bill Douskalis, IP Telephony: The Integration of Robust VoIP Services, Prentice Hall, 2000, ISBN 0-13-014118-6.
Wenyu Jiang, Jonathan Lennox, Henning Schulzrinne and Kundan Singh, "Towards Junking the PBX: Deploying IP Telephony"
Alan B. Johnston, SIP: Understanding the Session Initiation Protocol, Artech House, 2001, ISBN: 1-58053-168-7.
Olivier Hersent, David, Gurle, and Jea-Pierre Petit, IP Telephony: Packet-based multimedia communication systems, Addison-Wesley, 2000, ISBN 0-201-61910-5.
David Lovell and Scott Veibell Cisco IP Telephony, Cisco Press, 2001, ISBN: 1-58705-050-1.
Mark A. Miller, Voice over IP Technologies: Building the Converged Network, Hungry Minds, Inc., 2002, ISBN 0764549073.
Daniel Minoli, Delivering Voice over IP Networks, John Wiley and Sons, August 2002, ISBN 0-471-38606-5.
David J. Wright, Voice over Packet Networks, John Wiley and Sons, 2001, ISBN 0-471-49516-6.
The European Online Magazine for the IT Professional http://www.upgrade-cepis.org Vol. II, No. 3, Jun. 2001
R.G. Cole and J.H. Rosenbluth, "Voice Over IP Performance Monitoring", Computer Communication Review, a publication of ACM SIGCOMM, volume 31, number 2, April 2001. ISSN # 0146-4833 is available from: http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/ccr/archive/2001/apr01/ccr-200104-cole.html
William C. Hardy, "VoIP Service Quality: Measuring and Evaluating Packet-Switched Voice", McGraw-Hill, January 2003, 317 pages, ISBN: 0071410767. (note the reviews are very mixed on this book)
Paul Mahler, VoIP Telephony with Asterisk, Signate, San Francisco, CA, 2004. ISBN 0-9759992-0-6
Tom Tullis and Bill Albert, Measuring the User Expeience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics, Morgan Kaufmann, 2008, ISBN 978-0-12-373558-4

Useful URLs

J. Loughney and G. Camarillo, Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Requirements for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), RFC 3702, February 2004
J. Rosenberg, A Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Event Package for Registrations, RFC 3680, March 2004
P. Faltstrom and M. Mealling, "The E.164 to Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) Dynamic Delegation Discovery System (DDDS) Application (ENUM)", RFC 3761, April 2004.
J. Peterson, "enumservice registration for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Addresses-of-Record", RFC 3764, April 2004
O. Levin, "Telephone Number Mapping (ENUM) Service Registration for H.323", RFC 3762, April 2004
vovida.org contains source code for the Vovida Open Copmmunication Application Library (VOCAL), which includes the servers described in the course book.
note that Prof. H. Anthony Chan of San Jose State University taugh a course "EE284 Convergent Voice and Data Network" during Fall 2002 that also used the same textbook as this course.
- Henning Schulzrinne's Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) web pages
- Some SIP related Student Projects done under the supervision of Prof. Henning Schulzrinne
- Columbia InterNet Extensible Multimedia Architecture CINEMA
IETF SIP Working group (Note that this working group has concluded its work.)
IP Telephony
SIP Forum
SIP Center
Pulver.com - see for example the May 02, 2010, Guest Blog by Daniel Berninger - Reboot VoIP by SIP Enabling Email Addresses
VoiceTronix analog line cards
Voxilla.org hosts a collection of pointers to various open source telecom software projects for use with the GNU/Linux operating system
GNUComm pre-release versions of some GNUComm Components:
- GNU Bayonne, - Application Server -- a telecommunications application server; the focus is on voice response types of telephony applications.
- Babylon - Telephony Device Monitor
- TOSI - Client Call Control System
- Voice Mail - Multi-user messaging application
- Support Automation - Tele-support application
- Sales Automation - Tele-sales application
NIST-SIP a signaling stack and message parser for the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol); includes: a public domain extensible, modular JAVA based message parser for SIP, A simple stack with authentication, implementation of JAIN-SIP 1.0 interfaces, XML based call flow scripting tool, a test proxy with an XML interface for service creation, a trace viewer tool for visualization of message traces that passing through the stack
J. van der Merwe, R. Cceres, Y-H. Chu, C. Sreenan. Mmdump - A Tool for Monitoring Internet Multimedia Traffic. ACM Computer Communication Review, 30(4), October 2000. http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/article/vandermerwe00mmdump.html. See also http://www.research.att.com/info/Projects/mmdump
C.J. Sreenan, Jyh-Cheng Chen, P Agrawal, and B Narendran, "Delay reduction techniques for playout buffering," IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol. 2, no. 2, June 2000. http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/sreenan00delay.html
End-to-End delay: http://wwwtvs.et.tudelft.nl/people/piet/papers/e2edelayripe_IEEE.pdf see also http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/projects/cost263/meetings/09-namur/techdocs/Van-Mieghem-slides.pdf
Soonuk Seol and Myungchul Kim's Experiments and Analysis of VoIP over Mobile IP slides - see the related PIMRC 2002 paper.

Schedule

The schedule for lectures for IK2554 Practical Voice Over IP (VoIP) are shown below (Note that in the following "xx" means "xx:00", not "xx:15".):

Lecture Plan and Lecture Material (OH slides)

Note that the lectures will occur in a very intensive fashion to accommodate graduate students coming from elsewhere in Sweden.

version of lectures for 2010(~3MB).

Audio of the lectures is available (thanks to a student in the class).

Staff Associated with the Course

Lecturer (kursansvarig, föreläsare): Prof. Gerald Q. Maguire Jr. (maguire@kth.se)

Registering

Use the normal process for registering. For most students this means you should speak with your study advisor (studievägledare).

Other on-line Course related Material

A sample call and how to record with tcpdump and decode with tcpdump, ethereal, and ipgrab.
- Running /usr/local/vocal/bin/sipset as user 1010 on a linux PC named "tlclab01" (which will have the SIP URL sip:1010@192.168.194.24) and making a call to 1010@172.18.194.18 (which will have the SIP URL sip:1010@172.18.194.18). Thus user 1010 on tlclab01 makes a call, which user 1010 on 172.18.194.18 (a Cisco ATA 186) answers.
  At the end of the call, the user on tlclab01 hangs up.
- SIP-call-example
- rtp-filter.ethereal
- example-call.tcpdump
Examples of written reports submitted in 2004:
Andreas Ångström and Johan Sverin, VoiceXML and Khurram Jahangir Khan and Ming-Shuang Lang, Voice over Wireless LAN and analysis of MiniSIP as an 802.11 Phone both reports appear here with permission of the authors.
Stefano Ventura, VoIP & Security for Enterprise, Séminaire Grifes, Institute of Information and Communication Technologies (IICT), Haute Ecole d'Ingénierie et de Gestion du Canton de Vaud (HEIG-VD), Yverdon Switzerland, 8.11.2005 - a very nice introduction to VoIP security (in french)

Sources for Further Information

The course previously used: Henry Sinnreich and Alan B. Johnston, Internet Communications Using SIP: Delivering VoIP and Multimedia Services with Session Initiation Protocol, Wiley, 2001, ISBN: 0-471-41399-2 and a second book Luan Dang, Cullen Jennings, and David Kelly, Practical VoIP: Using VOCAL, O'Reilly, 2002, ISBN 0-596-00078-2.
Robin Schriebman, "Call phones from Gmail", Official Gmail Blog, Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 9:40 AM
Google Talk voice-chat
Google's Gizmo5
PeerMe, PeerMe, Inc.
Yahoo! builds upon Dialpad acquisition to offer VoIP via its messanger
MCI Web Calling for Windows Live Call
Grandstream NetworksSIP phones and analog telephone adpators
Internet Voice Campaign - part of the Voice On the Net (VON) Coalition (www.von.org)
Founding members of the Internet Voice Campaign include EarthLink, Google, Level 3, Pulver.com, Skype, Sonus Networks, and USA Datanet.
How to use SER with CPL
To use SER with TLS and minisip - change your TLS method in the openser.conf file to: "tls_method = SSLv23" (thanks to Pjothi's comments in the minisip users mailing list on Fri, 3 Feb 2006
thevoipweblog
tools for testing your soundcard
A useful tool for watching your SIP traffic is: ipgrab
A popular VoIP operator in the US is Vonage (http://www.vonage.com)
Jasomi Networks recently annouced their PeerPoint Centrex Edition device for serving VoIP customers behind NATs.
Digisip offers flat rate pricing to the swedish fixed network for 195 SEK/month {seems to be limited to 30 hours}
Bredbandsbolaget offers per minute pricing to the swedish fixed and mobile networks.
See the excellent list of references which Raj Jain has made available
Christian Hoene and Enhtuya Dulamsuren-Lalla of TU-Berlin, TKN, have developed a really nice application for showing the effect of packets loss on VoIP quality - Mongolia: An Auditory Testing Environment to Study the Importance of a VoIP Packet
For access to the KTH electronic library see KTHB e-library.
Texas A&M University (TAMU) and Internet2 have created a Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center (ITEC) focused on Voice over IP.>
OnDo's Brekeke a commercial VoIP PBX and SIP server; with an emphasis on its web interface
Digium the primary developer and sponsor of Asterisk™ is an open source linux based PBX
minisip - a SIP client with SRTP + MIKEY, developed by students from the course; see also the related eavesdropping tool "EVE"
VoIPong - utility which detects all Voice Over IP calls on a pipeline
SJ Labs SJphone - a SIP/H.323 softphone
iptel.org's list of softphones
sipXphone
SIP express router
SIP Express Media Server (SEMS)
VOMIT - voice over misconfigured internet telephones - given a tcpdump of a voice call creates a .wav file.
INRIA Phoenix list of SIP programs, testing, ...
VoIP Security Workshop, June 1-2, 2005, Washington DC
US National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST), "Security Considerations for Voice Over IP Systems", January 2005
(U.S.) National Emergency Number Association (NENA), "NENA IP Capable PSAP Features And Capabilities Standard", Document 58-001, Arlington, VA, February 1, 2005.
(U.S.) National Emergency Number Association (NENA) Migration Working Group of the Network Technical Committee, "NENA Technical Information Document on the Network Interface to IP Capable PSAP", NENA-08-501, June, 2004
AudioCodes VoIP, especially voice compression technology
"Connexion by Boeing" - be on-line even from aircraft
VoP Security Forum has a tool: SiVuS - The VoIP Vulnerability Scanner
Blue Box Podcast #22: SIP Security at IETF (part 1), VoIP security news, comments and more, April 7, 2006
University of Naples, in cooperation with Ericsson Nomadic Lab in Helsinki, have released a first implementation of an XCON-compliant conferencing platform. The server side is based on Asterisk and a modified version of its MeetMe application, while the client side is based on Minisip. The system uses the Binary Floor Control Protocol (BFCP). The project is called CONFIANCE (CONFerencing IMS-enabled Architecture for Next-generation Communication Experience).
For additional details about the proctocols see the IETF Centralized Conferencing (XCON) working group.
Alberto Escudero Pascual and Louise Berthilson, "VoIP-4D Primer- Building Voice Infrastructure in Developing Regions, Translators: Anas Tawileh (Arabic), Johan Bilien (French). Available in English, Arabic, French, and Spanish.
SIP debugging and testing
- Sipp (sipp.sourceforge.net) - conformance testing tool
- SIP Swiss Army Knife (SIP SAK) - a useful command line tool for SIP development and administration
Michael Vorländer, "Auralization of spaces", Physics Today, Volume 62 (6), June 2009, pp. 35-40.
For some figures on power consumption of IP phones see Green-VoIP with snom, based on the study: "Leistungsmessung von IP-Phones", FH Frankfurt am Main - University of Applied Sciences, Forschungsgruppe für Telekommunikationsnetzte, Dezember 2008
J. Rosenberg, "A Hitchhikers' Guide to SIP", IETF, Network Working Group, RFC 5411, January 2009
H. Sinnreich (Ed.), A. Johnston, E. Shim, and K. Singh, " Simple SIP Usage Scenario for Applications in the Endpoints", IETF, Network Working Group, Request for Comments: 5638, September 2009
Shanbo Li's masters thesis ( mirror) "Web Call Application" (August 2009) illustrates how SIP can be used to instantiate calls between parties by using a web server. It provides a good example of how third party call control can be used.

Previous versions of the course (both as IK2554 and the earlier 2G1325)

Page History

2011.01.31	added a subdirectory 2G1325 for old lecture material - to keep it accessible
2010.09.05	added audio recordings of the lectures
2010.08.26	added lecture notes for 2010
2010.08.17	small changes
2010.06.30	added schedule for Fall 2010
2010.04.13	some updates
2009.10.20	first version for 2010

© Copyright 2008, 2009, 2010 G.Q.Maguire Jr. (maguire@kth.se)
All Rights Reserved.
Thu Apr 21 17:51:41 CEST 2011