The Playout Control Management

Abstract

IP Telephony provides a way for an enterprise to extend consistent communication services to all employees, whether they are in main campus locations, at branch offices, or working remotely, also with a mobile phone. IP Telephony transmits voice communications over a network using open standard-based Internet protocols. This is both the strength and weakness of IP Telephony as the involved basic transport protocols (RTP, UDP, and IP) are not able to natively guarantee the required application quality of service (QoS). From the point of view of an IP Telephony Service Provider this definitely means possible waste of clients and money. Specifically the problem is at two different levels: i) in some countries, wherelong distance and particularly international call tariffs are high, perhaps due to a lack of competition or due to cross subsidies to other services, the major opportunity for IP Telephony Service Providers is for price arbitrage. This means working on diffusion of an acceptable service, although not at high quality levels; ii) in other countries, where different IP Telephony Service Providers already exist, the problem is competition for offering the best possible quality. The main idea behind this chapter is to analyze specifically the state of the art playout control strategies with the following aims: i) propose the reader the technical state of the art playout control management and planning strategies (overview of basic KPIs for IP Telephony); ii) compare the strategies IP Telephony Service Provider can choose with the aim of saving money and offering a better quality of service; iii) introduce also the state of the art quality index for IP Telephony, that is a set of algorithms for taking into account as many factors as possible to evaluate the service quality; iv) provide the reader with examples on some economic scenarios of IP Telephony.