Assessing network readiness for IP telephony

Networked multimedia applications require stringent real-time QoS guarantees. Successful deployment of such applications closely depends on the performance of the underlying data network. T he characteristics and the QoS requirements of these applications are different from traditional data applications. Hence, prior to deployment it is necessary to evaluate a network from a multimedia perspective. In this paper, we focus on IP Telephony and describe a framework for providing tools for IP Telephony readiness evaluation. This framework can be easily generalized to other multimedia applications. Our approach injects synthesized voice traffic and measures perceived end-to-end quality. We present a novel idea of relating voice quality metrics to the performance of data network devices. Following the proposed framework, we developed a prototype tool to evaluate a network and to identify problems, if any, prior to IP Telephony deployment. Our tool automatically discovers the topology of a given network, and collects and integrates network device performance and voice quality metrics. We describe the architecture of our tool and provide sample outputs from a network consisting of 129 devices.