VoIP

VoIP Solutions from WildPackets

The Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony revolution has been a long time coming. Finally businesses in every industry are rolling out VoIP applications in hopes of lowering the costs of infrastructure and operations. Vendors are reporting sales of millions of VoIP handsets. From home offices to Fortune 500 enterprises, VoIP is recognized as the next telephony technology to deploy.

For network engineers, VoIP presents a daunting set of challenges.

• VoIP dramatically increases the pressure on network engineers to resolve problems quickly. Why? Because end users who might tolerate slow performance from a business application will have no patience for garbled or interrupted phone calls. Telephone calls remain essential to business. VoIP failures can bring business conversations—and business itself—to a halt. By disrupting sales, support, press, and investor conversations, VoIP can irrevocably damage a company’s business relationships and professional image.
• VoIP requires network engineers to immediately become experts at telephony and voice technology. VoIP services can be degraded by VoIP application and protocol problems, by basic network problems, or by a combination of both. Until recently, most network engineers had to choose between network analyzers and VoIP analyzers—no tool integrated both types of analysis in a useful and affordable way. As a result, no engineer had all the analysis technology necessary to find and fix faults on VoIP networks.
• Most VoIP troubleshooting products are hardware-based, proprietary, expensive, and too bulky to be portable. Cumbersome, hardware-based solutions increase the expense of VoIP deployments and make it difficult for engineers to diagnose problems on site. When troubleshooting tools become too expensive, they may be dropped from the deployment budget entirely, leaving network engineers without any solution for finding and fixing VoIP faults.

WildPackets can help. WildPackets VoIP solutions are designed to meet the needs of:

• IT teams supporting VoIP applications on enterprise networks
• Service providers supporting VoIP applications for customers
• Field service personnel supporting VoIP equipment at customer sites

Products

OmniPeek Enterprise

OmniPeek Enterprise is WildPackets’ flagship product. It combines all of the features of the OmniPeek product line in one product, including support for local captures from multiple interfaces and connections to an unlimited number of distributed OmniEngines. It also supports data collection from any network topology, including 10 Gigabit and Gigabit networks, WAN links and local matrix switches. OmniPeek Enterprise is ideal for IT organizations responsible for network analysis and network service level agreements (SLAs) for the entire organization. A license of OmniPeek Enterprise should be considered for each location that will be supported by a network engineering professional. OmniPeek Enterprise also provides advanced voice and video over IP functionalities including signaling and media analyses of voice and video, VoIP playback, voice and video expert analysis, visual expert, and more.

Advanced Voice and Video Over IP Analysis

OmniPeek Enterprise is the only network analyzer offering Ethernet, Wireless, 10GbE, Gigabit, WAN, and Voice and Video over IP diagnostics in real-time. The Expert view provides in-depth analysis of latency, throughput, and numerous network problems in a conversation-centered display. Many of the test elements have user-defined settings and thresholds, allowing you to fine-tune the Expert System to suit your network environment. OmniPeek enterprise can analyze open calls without requiring any expensive voice and video processing hardware - providing unsurpassed capacity for post-deployment troubleshooting. In addition to Voice and Video decodes and analyses, OmniPeek enterprise also evaluates and displays the call setup mechanism, in real-time, for each open call. All active and closed calls in a capture are shown in an elegant summary screen. Single line per call provides easy, single-click drill down statistics for detailed troubleshooting.

It associates all the signaling (including RTCP status reports) and voice and video streams (RTP) on a per call basis and provides a flow of the signaling messages and endpoints that participate in the call. This includes measuring call setup durations and providing a Call Detail Record (CDR) for each call.

The Calls view displays all the calls in the order in which they were captured, with caller, callee, and end cause information. It provides comprehensive signaling analysis of SIP, Cisco Skinny, MEGACO, etc.

OmniEngine Enterprise

Designed for data centers, network operations centers and large application servers, OmniEngine Enterprise extends network analysis capabilities through distribution to any network segment or function, even to remote locations. Each OmniEngine can perform data capture and network analysis on multiple network interfaces, and over all network topologies, including wireless (802.11), 10 Gigabit and Gigabit networks and WAN links. This product is best deployed in large scale, distributed networks that include remote locations, providing continuous network monitoring and analysis without the need for local network engineering support. To completely cover your network analysis needs, one or more OmniEngines should be deployed at each remote location, with every server farm, and within the network operations core.

Voice and Video over IP Analysis

Building on WildPackets’ award-winning network and voice and video over IP analysis technologies, OmniEngine Enterprise performs real-time network and voice and video over IP analyses. Network engineers can rapidly troubleshoot faults – even faults occurring at remote locations – by using OmniEngine Enterprise to capture and analyze voice and video over IP media and signaling, and then OmniPeek to view real-time results.

White Papers

Finding and Fixing VoIP Call Quality Issues

WildPackets Forums

Join a growing community of networking professionals and exchange practical, expert advice on networking issues in the WildPackets Forums

Training

WP-102 Voice over IP (VoIP) Fundamentals with OmniPeek Voice and EtherPeek VX

This course provides: (1) a fundamental understanding of VoIP architecture, (2) an awareness of common VoIP issues/ solutions, and (3) practical methods for analyzing voice communication on IP-based networks using protocol analysis tools. It will make sense of the emerging VoIP technologies, Quality of Service measurements, and the competing standards in the market today. This course is a combination of lecture and labs.

For more information please contact training@wildpackets.com

Links

News Sites

Business Communications Review (BCR) (free VoiceCon eNews newsletter)
http://www.bcr.com

eWEEK VoIP & Telephony Topic Center
http://www.eweek.com/category2/0,1738,1586434,00.asp

FierceVoIP (developments in VoIP technology and business, with insider intelligence you won't find elsewhere)
http://www.fiercemarkets.com/newsletters/

Internet Telephony magazine
http://www.tmcnet.com/it/

searchnetworking.techtarget.com ("Learning Guide: Voice over IP" tip published 5/24/04 with overview, mini-glossary, definitions, books, basics, etc.)
http://www.searchnetworking.techtarget.com
All tips

VoIP Daily (web blog for readers to comment on VoIP news)
VoIP Developer Channel on TMCnet (news, articles and case studies on the development of VoIP products and technologies)

VoIP Monitor
http://www.voip-monitor.com/

VON Magazine
http://www.vonmag.com

Technical References

H.323 Forum
H.323 Overview
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
IETF List of Internet Drafts
International Telecommunications Union (ITU)
Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP)
Protocols.com VOIP Page
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)