A Practical Approach To Integrate Teaching Voice Over Ip Technology In The Classroom

Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract A Practical Approach to Integrate Teaching Voice-over-IP Technology in the Classroom 1 Introduction Voice-Over-IP (VoIP), also called IP telephony, Internet Telephony, and Digital Phone, is simply transporting voice traffic using the Internet Protocol (IP). The Internet Protocol has become the de facto standard for data transactions and its ubiquitous presence has made it a suitable choice for transporting voice and video. VoIP technology offers many attractive advantages over the legacy telephony, including lower equipment cost, lower operation expenses, and integration of voice and data networks. Today’s IP telephony infrastructure has been enabled by significant investments in research and development. As IP telephony becomes more compatible with the legacy telephony, businesses and individuals find more compelling reasons to migrate to IP- basis telephony. Meanwhile, the high demand for VoIP has fueled business cases for the next generation carriers to build more reliable IP-based voice networks which can also be interconnected to the legacy public switched telephone network (PSTN). In fact, today, the majority of international calling card services are IP-based. With such widespread applications and availability, learning about VoIP, its protocols, and underlying technologies can be considered as valuable academic investment. Consequently, engineering, IT, and technology students who are familiar with these concepts can be ready for the future competitive job market. Unfortunately, as in many other universities and colleges, at Central Connecticut State University we offer no specific courses on VoIP technology. In fact, in the current networking and IT curriculums, we don’t even cover the topic of Voice-over-IP. Consequently, many of our graduates and undergraduate students have very little understanding of VoIP and its underlying technologies. In this paper we present a simple VoIP laboratory experiment that can be integrated in the classroom. As an introduction to VoIP systems, this experiment can be included in different courses covering advanced networking, Internet technologies, and related topics. Using freely available software, the VoIP experiment presented in this paper can be implemented in any isolated lab environment. Through this experiment, students learn about the basic concepts of IP-based networks, including setting up a voice server and configuring clients, become familiar with network performance parameters (e.g., packet loss and jitter), understand call set-up and tear-down procedure and various signaling protocols involved in such processes, and analyze the impact of traffic volume on voice degradation. In this paper, we also discuss possible extensions to this experiment, including WiFi-based VoIP networks.