Activities update

["Walt Magnussen" <>]

Several of the VOIP working group met the week before  last week at the Joint 
techs meeting in Tempe as a precursor to events in our area that are coming 
up.  While we had an excellent meeting it only showed us how far we have yet 
to go.  We did have some VOIP phones set up in the commons area for our 
Institutions that are peered with the VOIP test bed to be able to call home.  
We had 3.5 Institutions on line (Texas A&M University, Indiana Unviersity, 
the Australian AARNet and Penn State University one way).  We are planning to 
bring more instruments to the Spring I2 meeting in Washington DC.  We would 
like to have the original 20 institutions peered by then.  Mike Enyeart of 
IU, Walt Magnussen of TAMU and Stephen Kingham of the AARNet met to work on 
the next steps.   The following is a list of items that we would like to 
tackle.  

"       VOIP workshop - We are about to announce a three day VOIP workshop to 
be held at Texas A&M University.  The days are April 3 through 5.  Watch the 
I2 web page for more details.
"       Meeting with H.323 video working group - Mike and I are going to meet 
with the Digital Video working group in early March.  The video group is also 
host a workshop in late April. The intent of the meeting is to ensure 
coordination of our activities.
"       Peering web page - We are going to set up a peering web page within 
the next two weeks.  The purpose is to provide information about the sites 
that have completed the peering process.
"       Spring meeting activities and meetings - with the Spring meeting 
coming up in May it is time to think about agenda items.  Rather than the 
normal update meeting that we have had for the past two years, Mike and I 
would like to invite all of you to bring up some ideas of tasks that we could 
take on at the meeting. We don't get together that often so it is important 
that we take maximum advantage of the time.
"       Peering of 20 campuses both Cisco and non-Cisco - At this time we are 
peering between Texas A&M University, Indiana University, the AARNet and we 
are close to completing Penn State University.  The next round of 
Universities include: University of Washington, and Brazil.  We are once 
again asking for campuses that are ready to take the plunge.  We have the 
Cisco to Cisco routine down well.  We would like to start tackling non-Cisco 
sites.
"       Layering of Gatekeepers into a hierarchical system - While our 
initial desire was to try to find a way that we could use Multicast to 
advertise new peers it appears that this is currently not supported by the 
industry.  As a second choice we are working on a set of hierarchical 
arranged gatekeepers.  The plan provides at least one on each continent.  The 
initial gatekeeper is at Indiana University in the US and we are building a 
shadow site at TAMU as we speak.  This will allow for redundancy.  We may 
have a site in Europe and South America (Mike is working on Europe and I am 
working on South America) and of course we have Australia well covered 
(thanks to Steven Kingham).
"       Better than PSTN audio conference system - We are working with 
Colombia University and a SIP phone manufacturer to develop a better than 
PSTN audio conference system.  The system could use GIPS (a 7 KHz codec) to 
provide this service.
"       VOIP next steps (IPv6, measurement, testing tools, VOIP Beacon, QoS, 
Billing, Directories etc) - This is the area that we need the most help on.  
Any ideas from the membership would be greatly appreciated.
"       Create a VOIP development coordination /facilitation process.  At the 
Tempe meeting we talked to several vendors about potential development 
possibilities.  We would like for someone in the working group to help to act 
as a clearing house in getting vendors together with I2 institutions that 
have faculty that are interested in this area. 
"       Coordination with other working groups (i.e. QoS, Middleware,  
Digital Video, Testing and Measurement etc. ) - at one of the early meetings 
we discussed the desire to have the VOIP WG  work with other working groups.  
For example several of our members have expressed a desire to conduct active 
research in the QoS arena.  Mike and I would like to propose that we have 
members volunteer to work both with the VOIP WG as well as another WG that 
may be of interest to them to act as a liaison.  The idea for example would 
be that the liaison would bring the VOIP WG QoS needs to the QoS WG rather 
than to reinvent the wheel.  Let either Mike or I know if you are interested 
in being such a liaison person.

In other words, this email is being sent out not only to inform the members 
of the activities but also to solicit participation.  

Walt Magnussen,

Co-Chair  

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