The Big Pieces of the VOIP Puzzle

Significant Pieces of the Puzzle

VoIP and IP Telephony
VoIP deals with transfer of voice or audio signals over a TCP/IP network. The essential problem here is to
convert voice or audio signals into digital form so that the resultant bytes can be transmitted over the
TCP/IP network

IP Telephony addresses the additional issue of the transfer of TCP/IP packets containing audio data to and
from conventional telephone networks.

IP Telephone Gateway
In order to get TCP/IP data into a conventional telephone network requires a special device called the IP-
Telephone gateway. This device has two (electrical) interfaces - one connects to a telephone line and the
other connects to TCP/IP network typically over ethernet.

The device contains a hardware + software implementation of a mechanism that can convert traffic from
one interface to the other. The mechanism consists of a function to extract audio data from a tcp/ip packet
and convert it into an audio signal and another mechanism to do the converse. Apart from this, there are
functions for call setup and call management.

H-323 Protocol
Since VoIP and IP telephony equipment is communication equipment, there is a requirement of
interoperability which can only be addressed by a standard for data interchange. This means that the
computer from which a person is talking over a VOIP connection could have software / hardware from one
vendor which is generating TCP/IP data packets containing the audio signal as digital bytes. This packet
could reach an IP-Telephone gateway from a different company. Now the gateway needs to convert the
digital bytes from the packet into an audio signal. The only way that this can happen is if both devices
encode audio data in the exact same way.

A standard for the audio data encoding format is H-323 (aka H-323 Protocol). This format also supports
encoding of video conferencing data. Most IP Telephony and VOIP devices support this format. Another
format used for this purpose is SIP although it is not as popular as H-323.