IP Telephony Cookbook Project: (Accepted for pilot project funding by the TERENA Technical Committee) Summary of proposal The project will involve 10 man months work (over an 11 month period, from 1 st April 2003 to 29 th February 2004). The work to be carried out in this project has been discussed between the VoIP mailing list members and it consists of: creation of a reference document (referred as cookbook) available to the TERENA user community for: o setting up IP telephony solutions; o providing information about VoIP protocols; o providing information about available hardware/software; o providing guidelines for connecting the campus/university islands to the European Global Dialing Scheme (GDS). Providing selected parts of the reference document accessible through the World Wide Web: distributed across a number of web sites with a central portal provided by TERENA. The work will be carried out by the VoIP mailing list members who have expressed their interest in contributing to such a project and have a certain degree of expertise in the field of IP Telephony. Justification TERENA was requested by some members to start an investigation into IP telephony in September 2001. The response was very positive and suggestions were made to coordinate the creation of a cookbook with recommendations for setting up IP telephony solutions at campus and university level, providing information about protocols and interoperability of equipment, as well as integration with the existing international gatekeeper hierarchy for H.323 conferencing. Many initiatives in the Europe are related to the setting up of IP Telephony islands and were explained by means of formal presentations at the following meetings: March 2002, TERENA workshop on IP Telephony, TERENA premises, Amsterdam, The Netherlands June 2002, VoIP meeting at TERENA Networking Conference 2002, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland The experiences described in those meeting have highlighted that there is a demonstrable need to address the topic general guiding principles in setting up IP Telephony in order to give the research institutions a common layout were to experiment IP Telephony services. The VoIP mailing list archive is available at: http://hypermail.terena.nl/voip/ TERENA Project Proposal: IP Telephony Cookbook Page 1 / 5
Moreover more detailed information about the workshops/meetings as well as presentations done are available at: http://www.terena.nl/tech/iptel/ Objectives The cookbook itself will be targeted at an audience of network engineers and system administrations at universities and NREN's). Its objectives will be summarized as follows: provide an overview of the basics of IP telephony and the various technologies available today (as well as observable trends for the near future); discuss models / scenarios for deploying IP telephony and outline how to build a IP Telephony infrastructure; provide information/guidelines on IP Telephony protocols and how to set up basic services; provide information/guidelines on how to set-up advanced services; provide information/guidelines on how to connect an existing or a future single IP Telephony island to a wider dialing plan ; discuss which regulatory and legal aspects need to be taken into account when providing local (intra-site) as well as global (inter-site) IP telephony services; provide information/experiences on IP Telephony hardware/software available and their interoperability; and provide information about past and present IP telephony projects in Europe. Deliverables The project will produce a number of deliverables as outlined below. The deliverables will be incremental releases of the entire cookbook to minimize the total finishing overhead. The cookbook will be written from sequentially, i.e. the earlier chapters will be delivered first. The overall outline of the cookbook directly follows from the above objectives: 1. Introduction 2. Technology Background 3. IP Telephony Scenarios 4. Setting up Basic services 5. Setting up Advanced Services (telephony-centric) 6. Setting up Value-Added Service (in addition to pure telephony services) 7. Global telephony integration 8. Regulatory / Legal considerations Annex: A) European IP Telephony Projects B) IP Telephony Hardware/Software The documents will be provided in digital format (HTML and/or PDF). TERENA Project Proposal: IP Telephony Cookbook Page 2 / 5
The contents will be produced in the following four deliverables: D1 Introduction and Background (Chapters 1, 2, and 3) D2 Basic/Advanced/Value-added service (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) D3 Global telephony, regulatory and legal issues (Chapters 7 and 8) D4 Finished Cookbook (including Annex) The Annex will be developed continuously throughout the entire project duration. The collected information will be maintained on an informal web site. A timely snapshot will be included in the final version of the cookbook as part of D4. The work will proceed in four phases (with possible overlapping within the phases) from 1 st April 2003 to 29 th February 2004. Each phase will produce exactly one deliverable. It is expected that earlier chapters may be revisited and updated during later stages of the project if the need arises; e.g. if new technological developments need to be considered, trends changes, or new current practices take shape. Note, however, that given the limited resource this tracking must be restricted to core concepts and base technologies. The following phases will the produce the following deliverables (as milestones): Phase Duration Del. Due date Phase 1 1 st April 2003 31 st July 2003 D1 2003-08-01 Phase 2 1 st August 2003 31 st October 2003 D2 2003-11-01 Phase 3 1 st November 2003 31 st January 2004 D3 2004-02-01 Phase 4 1 st February 2004 29 th February 2004 D4 2004-03-01 The project cut off point will be 29 th February 2004. Any follow up work identified during the project will be considered as a new project. Contribution commitments to the project There has been quite some willingness to contribute to the project from a variety of people with significant expertise in the area of IP telephony. All these contributions are welcome and will be included in the IP telephony cookbook. The solution discussed and agreed upon by the consortium is to have three responsible partners who will receive reasonable funding for personnel and travel cost and will be responsible for the results of the cookbook. In addition, a number of contributors are volunteering to provide input to the cookbook with only minor compensation that will be recognized in the cookbook. Partners: The following organizations (represented in this project by the person s names) are partners: TERENA Project Proposal: IP Telephony Cookbook Page 3 / 5
University of Pisa (Saverio Niccolini, project coordinator) (Prof. Stefano Giordano, Dr. Rosario Garroppo) Universität Bremen TZI (Dr. Jörg Ott, Stefan Prelle) FhG Fokus (Dr. Dorgham Sisalem) Contributors: The following organizations (represented in this project by the person s names) are contributors: CESNET (Dr. Sven Ubik) Karl-Franzens-Uni Graz (Dr. Margit Brandl) GRNET (Dimitris Daskopoulos) SURFnet (Roland Staring, Egon Verharen) Project Funding: A project funding has been offered through TERENA and various member institutions. Further funding is still sought to reduce the self-financing part (of currently more than 20%) for the partners. Project Meetings The project is expected to meet twice in Amsterdam. A third meeting may be decided upon if the need arises. Date Meeting subject April 2003 September 2003 February 2004 Kickoff meeting Project progress monitoring; review of the current state of the draft cookbook; planning finalizing D2 (optional) Finishing of the cookbook (possibly small editing group) Evaluation criteria Acceptance of final recommendations publication by panel of selected evaluators. Publication of the compiled cookbook in the TERENA web-site. Electronically dissemination of the compiled cookbook to the European research community (universities, NREN s). Availability of selected information as a set of (distributed) web pages (this is likely to include product and project information from the Annex). Agreed evaluation panel An evaluation panel will be established during the project s lifetime. Change control mechanism 1. Preliminary consensus on VoIP discussion list TERENA Project Proposal: IP Telephony Cookbook Page 4 / 5
2. Final approval by TERENA Technical Committee 3. Using a central CVS repository for versioning and documenting changes; Uni Bremen TZI will be happy to provide the required facilities. TERENA Project Proposal: IP Telephony Cookbook Page 5 / 5