Existing standard protocols for the web and Internet telephony fail to deliver real-time interactive communication from within a web browser. In particular, the client-server web protocol over reliable TCP is not always suitable for end-to-end low latency media path needed for interactive voice and video communication. To solve this, we compare the available platform options using the existing technologies such as modifying the web programming language and protocol, using an existing web browser plugin, and a separate host resident application that the web browser can talk to. We argue that using a separate application as an adaptor is a promising short term as well as long-term strategy for voice and video communications on the web.Our project aims at developing the open technology and sample implementations for web-based real-time voice and video communication applications. We describe the architecture of our project including (1) a RESTful web communication API over HTTP inspired by SIP message flows, (2) a web-friendly set of metadata for session description, and (3) an UDP-based end-toend media path. All other telephony functions reside in the web application itself and/or in web feature servers. The adaptor approach allows us to easily add new voice and video codecs and NAT traversal technologies such as Host Identity Protocol. We want to make web-based communication accessible to millions of web developers, maximize the end user experience and security, and preserve the huge global investment in and experience from SIP systems while adhering to web standards and development tools as much as possible. We have created an open source prototype that allows you to freely use the conference application by directing a browser to the conference URL.

In this paper, we present the creation and characterization of an open source Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) test bed. We built this test bed with the intention and motivation of doing research related to the performance of its various functional components as they cooperate to provide IMS features. The IMS specifications describe a set of functional components, the interfaces between those components, and the protocols and procedures to be used across those interfaces. The test bed is built based on the "Open IMS Core", which is an open source set of IMS functional components. We verify that the operation of the test bed is in conformance with the message sequence charts provided by the IMS standards. Moreover, we define four metrics that quantify the overhead associated with IMS implementations, and present the observed values of these metrics collected on the test bed under the conditions of no background traffic. This provides necessary and valuable data for us in order to study the performance when the test bed is under various background traffic loads.

In this article we describe the discussion and conclusions of the "Roundtable on Real-Time Communications Research: 5G and Real-Time Communications --- Topics for Research" held at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Real-Time Communications Conference and Expo, co-located with the IPT-Comm Conference, October 5--8, 2015.

This document provides a terminology for benchmarking the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) performance of devices. Methodology related to benchmarking SIP devices is described in the companion methodology document (RFC 7502). Using these two documents, benchmarks can be obtained and compared for different types of devices such as SIP Proxy Servers, Registrars, and Session Border Controllers. The term "performance" in this context means the capacity of the Device Under Test (DUT) to process SIP messages. Media streams are used only to study how they impact the signaling behavior. The intent of the two documents is to provide a normalized set of tests that will enable an objective comparison of the capacity of SIP devices. Test setup parameters and a methodology are necessary because SIP allows a wide range of configurations and operational conditions that can influence performance benchmark measurements. A standard terminology and methodology will ensure that benchmarks have consistent definitions and were obtained following the same procedures.

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