IAX-Based Peer-to-Peer VoIP Architecture

Abstract

Nowadays, Voice over IP (VoIP) constitutes a privileged field of service innovation. One benefit of the VoIP technology is that it may be deployed using a centralized or a distributed architecture. One of the most efficient approaches used in the deployment of centralized VoIP systems is based on the use of IAX (Inter-Asterisk Exchange), an open-source signaling/data exchange protocol. Even though they are currently widely used, client-server VoIP systems suffer from many weaknesses such as the presence of single points of failure, an inefficient resources management, and system non-scalability. In order to help the development of scalable and reliable VoIP systems, the development community starts tending towards the deployment of the VoIP service using a peer-to-peer distributed architecture. The aim of this paper is to develop an IAX-based peer-to-peer VoIP architecture, an optimized VoIP architecture that takes advantage of the benefits of the IAX protocol and those of the peer-to-peer distribution model.