SDVoIP—A Software-Defined VoIP Framework For SIP And Dynamic QoS

Software-defined networking (SDN) allows for the decoupling of the control and data planes, enabling more programmability and a global view of the network. Previous research indicates that traditional applications recreated using SDN principles allow for more granularity and customization. In this research, we extend the insights behind SDN to develop a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) framework with the objective to enhance traditional Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) operation and quality of service (QoS) approaches. The contributions of this research are 2-fold: first, an SIP control application is implemented, which communicates with an SDN controller to provide VoIP call registration and call routing capabilities, thereby eliminating the need for specialized SIP proxy hardware devices; second, a dynamic QoS application is developed that provides the ability to make network-wide QoS decisions based on real-time network measurements of latency, bandwidth and packet loss. Functional validation of the framework is performed to verify its operation. The experiment results indicate that the proposed framework allows for enhancements to traditional QoS implementations.