Category: Telecom Architectures

Network characteristics like architecture nodes and flows of Telecom Networks

VoIP API design

Public API endpoints Internal API gatewaysAPI Rate Limiter Token based Rate LimitingToken bucket filterHierarchical Token Bucket (HTB)Fair QueingCBQ (Class Based Queing)Modular QoS command-Line interface (MQC) ShapingThrottling VoIP manages Call setup and teardown using IP protocol. The APIs can be used to provide public or internal endpoinst to create mnage calls , conference addon services like … Continue reading VoIP API design

High availiability and Scalibility in VoIP platforms

Load Balancers MPLSService-discoveryKeepalive, unregistering unhealthy nodesReplicationData Store Replication Quick Response / Low latencyScalabilityautoscallingPartitioiningMultiple PoPs (point of presence)Minimal Latency and lowest amount of tarffic via public internetHigh availiability (HA) 5 9's in aggregate failuresHA for Load balancer (LB)HA for Call Control app server Media Server HASecurity against malicious attacksMITMDDOS Identifying outages , logs and pcap analysis … Continue reading High availiability and Scalibility in VoIP platforms

EEP (formely HEP) Extensible Encapsulation Protocol with HOMER

EEP duplicates and IP datagram and encapsulates and sends for remote relatime monitoring for SIP specific alerts and notifications . HEP is popular among many SIP servers including Freeswitch , Opensips , kamailio , RTP engine as an external module .

  • intended for passive duplicated for remote collection
  • can be used for audit storage and analysis
  • does not alter the orignal datagram or headers

HOMER is Packet and Event capture system popular fpr VOIP/RTC Monitoring based on HEP/EEP (Extensible Encapsulation protocol)

SIP Trunks

Traditional trunk call SIP trunk (older) systems Centralized SIP Trunk Model SIP trunking is an IP-based alternative to ISDN trunking services Planning to set up SIP trunk Features of SIP trunking Future of SIP trunks With the dawn of IP telephony service and cloud communication platforms in recent years, the SIP has caught the attention … Continue reading SIP Trunks

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in VoIP

VoIP service providers as Data Processors Most VoIP service providers are multinational in nature with services offered directly or indirectly to all regions. The GDPR imposes direct statutory obligations on data processors, which means they will be subject to direct enforcement by supervisory authorities, fines, and compensation claims by data subjects.

Problems and Attacks on SIP Networks

Major standards bodies including 3GPP, ITU-T, and ETSI have all adopted SIP as the core signalling protocol for LTE, VoIP, conferencing, Video on Demand (VoD), IPTV (Internet Television), presence, and Instant Messaging (IM) among others. With the continuous evolution of SIP as the defacto VoIP protocol, we need to understand the risk mitigation practices around … Continue reading Problems and Attacks on SIP Networks

Certificates, compliances and Security in VoIP

This article describes various Certificates and compliances, Bill and Acts on data privacy, Security and prevention of Robocalls as adopted by countries around the world pertaining to Interconnected VoIP providers, telecommunications services, wireless telephone companies , HIPPa , SOX , GDPR , COPPA , CPNI , CCPA , PDP,SPIT ,Traced ACT , CRTC , Fcc E911

CLI/NCLI, Robocalls and STIR/SHAKEN

CLI (Caller Line Identification)Non-CLI (Non-Caller Line Identification)Secure Telephony Identity Revisited (STIR) Attestation levelsSignature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (SHAKEN) To understand the need for implementing an identification verification technique in Internet protocol based network to network communication system, we need to evaluate the existing problem plaguing the VoIP setup that is unwanted robo calls … Continue reading CLI/NCLI, Robocalls and STIR/SHAKEN

Hosted IP-PBX and SBC

SBC ( Session Borde Controllers ) are basically gateways that provide interconnectivity between the hosted IP-PBX of the enterprise to the outside world endpoints such as telco service provider, PSTN/ TDM , SIP trunking providers or even third party OTT provider apps like skype for business etc.

VoIP system DevOps, operations and Infrastructure management, Automation

operate and maintain a growing large scale VoIP Platform PCAP Collections CICD on Jenkins pipeline Configuration management using chef cookbooks virtualization and containerization using Docker Infrastructure management using terraform / Kubernetes Logs Analysis and Alarming

Secure Communication with SRTP and key managemnt protocols like SDES, ZRTP and DTLS

With advent of Voice over IP, the real time streaming of data/audio/video also became critically important to be protected from eavesdropping or modification over the open internet. While Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) is a profile of the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), which can provide confidentiality, message authentication, and replay protection to the RTP traffic and to the control traffic for RTP, the Real-time Transport Control Protocol (RTCP).

Gstreamer

GStreamer ( LGPL )is a media handling library written in C for applications such as streaming, recording, playback, mixing and editing attributes so on. Even enhanced applications such as transcoding , media format conversion , streaming servers for embedded devices ( read more about Gstreamer in RPi in my article here). It is a pipeline … Continue reading Gstreamer

OTT ( Over the Top ) Communication applications

Market trends are not in favour of Telecom Service /providers with increasing use of OTT ( Over The Top ) applications like WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Google hangouts, skype, Viber, etc. OTT applications are often blamed to take a stake in voice traffic revenue by using IP calls where the telco could've charged based on its … Continue reading OTT ( Over the Top ) Communication applications

Harmonization of services between generations of telecommunication core layers

Telecommunication service Harmonization Gateways based Harmonization Service Broker based Harmonization Legacy switches vs Softswitches Service Delivery Layer in Legacy vs Harmonized Services A communication system can be made up of many components which are individually undergoing evolution such as access layer generations, and core layer upgrades. Harmonized and uniform open standard-based service delivery platforms over … Continue reading Harmonization of services between generations of telecommunication core layers