Even before it plants its feet, Voice over Internet Protocol soon may see its sun fade as another protocol emerges on the horizon: Voice and Video over Internet Protocol.
Triggered by the efforts of four companies led by Freescale Semiconductor, the reference platform may turn up interest among carriers in multimedia services to provide services for consumers at home, in the field, at sedentary locations and on the fly. This technology is focused on wireless handheld devices.
The other companies involved in the effort include Trinity Convergence, Radvision and Metrowerks.
Dramatizing how the technology would benefit the end user, the firms offer the following description. “Imagine calling a friend and seeing him on your slim Wi-Fi-over-IP handheld, then zooming in for a better visual experience and starting a videoconference on demand. Now switch the conference to your TV set to share with a larger group of friends or colleagues in the room.”
Freescale said it expects the product, which Freescale said will have implications for VoIP, to be available in the first half of next year. “Some portion of VoIP will be obsolete,” said Mike Olivarez, principal staff scientist for Freescale, explaining that V2IP will not sound the death knell for VoIP. “Not every network will be able to do V2IP. They will transition over time.”
After all, he noted, analog is still holding its own in spite of the dominant sway of digital technology.
V2IP has drawn the investments and research efforts of several companies through the years, so these four companies see their accomplishment as a crowning triumph following successive missteps by others. The technology also is coming at a time when industry has made strides toward improving networks with high bandwidth and IP capabilities.
The main obstacles have been security and quality of service, remarked Olivarez. A company named Vtel has been working on V2IP for years, but observers said it unveiled only proprietary solutions that also turned out to be expensive.
V2IP does not provide “a single class of service but a platform for launching hundreds of multimedia-based services with an eye to managing security, quality of service, authentication and entitlement, including digital rights management,” commented Tim Spencer, president and chief operating officer at Sigma Systems Inc., a broadband operation support systems company.
Olivarez said one of the challenges has been to ensure that voice and video can coexist without dropped calls of either. Spencer said Session Initiation Protocol is the glue that holds voice and video together. SIP has also been a key part of the Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem to which carriers are upgrading their networks.
Freescale said it will deliver the V2IP solution based on its i.MX21 multimedia applications processor, which will feature video encode and decode hardware speed performance. From the handset perspective, Freescale said its i.MX21 will make processing relatively easy. Its Enhanced Multimedia Accelerator will enable the devices to encode and decode video messages and sessions, said Olivarez.
As Freescale provides the hardware part of the collaboration, Radvision will handle the transport layer, including the SIP portion. Metrowerks will provide the tools for designing solutions. Trinity will bring its quality-of-service expertise into the deal.
The four companies will collaborate to design, port and optimize the solution using the Linux operating system, said Freescale. The companies said they have been working on the technology for eight months
The video and audio features include H.263 and MPEG4 video, JPEG imaging, audio codecs, mirroring, zooming, rotation and more.
“With this platform, our customers can create and launch a new V2IP wired or wireless device in just a few months,” said Thierry Cammal, Freescale’s general manager of the wireless and mobile system group in Europe.
