VoIP (Voice over internet protocol)

Day before yesterday, I was called up in our HoD's office. He asked me to present a paper for university level Tech. fest organised by Chandigarh Engg. College.
I agreed as I couldn't talk myself out of that. The topic list included several enticing topics but the one that fascinated me the most was VoIP.
here's a glimpse of the abstract I prepared....

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)

Author: - Jasjeet Chawla

Student, I.E.T. BHADDAL

ABSTRACT:

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) allows you to make telephone calls using an Internet connection instead of a regular telephone line. One of the most important things to point out is that VoIP is not limited to voice communication. In fact, a number of efforts have been made to change this popular marketing term to better reflect the fact that VoIP means voice, video, and data conferencing. VoIP is important because, there is an opportunity to bring about significant change in the way that people communicate. It allows the usage of a single high-speed Internet connection for all voice, video, and data communications, usually termed as convergence. Virtually every device in the world uses a standard called Real Time Protocol(RTP) for transmitting audio and video packets between communicating computers. Before audio or video media can flow between two computers, various protocols must be employed to find the remote device and to negotiate the means by which media will flow between the two devices. The protocols that are central to this process are commonly referred to as call-signaling protocols, the most popular of which are H.323 and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and they both rely on static provisioning. Fundamentally, H.323 and SIP allow users to do the same thing: to establish multimedia communication (audio, video, or other data communication), however, they differ significantly in their design.

In this paper, I intend to present my case studies on two key VoIP enabled software applications viz. SKYPE and X-LITE: Skype is a "complete black box" -- that is, it is extremely hard for the lay user to identify what it is doing, or what it might be doing, or how appropriately it is doing it. Skype has been criticized over its use of a proprietary protocol, instead of an open standard like H.323, IAX, or SIP, since this makes it impossible for other providers to interact with the Skype network. X-Lite provides endpoint VoIP solutions that use internet-based telephony servers within an enterprise LAN (Local Area Network) or VoIP service provider network.