Voice over IP over GPRS

The Voice over IP (VoIP) technology has become prevalent today due to its lower cost than traditional telephony and its ability to support new value-added services. Additionally, the increasing availability of wireless internet access has led to research studies examining the combination of wireless network access with voice over IP. With the widespread availability of advanced mobile phones and Pocket PCs, the need for VoIP applications on these mobile platforms is tangible. To enable this, we need to evaluate the current wireless access technologies to see if they can support the necessary traffic and implement software to offer these VoIP services to users. In order to easily implement an IP-based service on GSM technology, we should use the GPRS service provided by the GSM operators. In this thesis, we evaluate Voice over IP service over GPRS in terms of feasibility and quality. Following this we ported a locally developed VoIP program to a Pocket PC (with GSM SIM-card support) which runs Microsoft’s Windows Mobile in order to provide suitable software as needed to offer the service from such a portable device.