article

Can you hear me now?!: it must be BGP

Authors:

Srikanth Kandula,

Dina KatabiAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 37, Issue 2

Pages 75 - 84

https://doi.org/10.1145/1232919.1232927

Published: 20 March 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Industry observers expect VoIP to eventually replace most of the existing land-line telephone connections. Currently however, quality and reliability concerns largely limit VoIP usage to either personal calls on cross-domain services such as Skype and Vonage, or to single-domain services such as trunking, where a core ISP carries long-distance voice as VoIP only within its backbone, to save cost with a unified voice/data infrastructure. This paper investigates the factors that prevent cross-domain VoIP deployments from achieving the quality and reliability of existing land-line telephony (PSTN). We ran over 50,000 VoIP phone calls between 24 locations in US and Europe for a three-week period. Our results indicate that VoIP usability is hindered as much by BGP's slow convergence as network congestion. In fact, about half of the unintelligible VoIP samples in our data occur within 10 minutes of a BGP update

References

[1]

Cable Operators Embrace VoIP. http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40374.html.

[2]

Linphone: Telephony on Linux. http://www.linphone.org.

[3]

Mean Opinion Score. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean Opinion Score.

[4]

Abilene. http://monon.uits.iupui.edu/.

[5]

Y. Amir, C. Danilov, S. Goose, D. Hedqvist, and A. Terzis. An Overlay Architecture for High Quality VoIP Streams. In IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, December 2006.

Digital Library

[6]

Y. Amir et al. 1-800-OVERLAYS: Using Overlay Networks to Improve VoIP Quality.

[7]

D. Andersen, H. Balakrishnan, M. F. Kaashoek, and R. Morris. Resilient Overlay Networks. In SOSP, 2001.

Digital Library

[8]

S. Baset and H. Schulzrinne. Analysis of the Skype Peer to Peer Internet Telephony Protocol. In INFOCOM, 2006.

[9]

O. Bonaventure, C. Filsfils, and P. Francois. Achieving sub-50ms Recovery upon BGP Peering Link Failures. In Co-Next, 2005.

Digital Library

[10]

C. Boutremans, G. Iannaccone, and C. Diot. Impact of link failures on VoIP performance. In NOSSDAV, 2002.

Digital Library

[11]

K.-T. Chen et al. Quantifying Skype User Satisfaction. In SIGCOMM, August 2006.

Digital Library

[12]

W.-H. Chiang et al. A Performance Study of VoIP Applications: MSN vs. Skype. In MULTICOMM, 2006.

[13]

D. Clark, W. Lehr, P. Faratin, S. Bauer, and J. Wroclawski. The Growth of Internet Overlay Networks: Implications for Architecture, Industry Structure and Policy. In TPRC, 2005.

[14]

P. Drew and C. Gallon. Next-Generation VoIP Network Architecture. Technical Report MSF-TR-ARCH-001-FINAL, Multiservice Switching Forum, March 2003.

[15]

T. Espiner. Skype's Market Share Halves, February 2006. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/broadband/0,39020342,39250116,00.htm.

[16]

A. Freedman. Edge/Core Update Propagation, Churn vs. Performance, 2001. Presentation at Internet Statistics and Metrics Analysis workshop (ISMA).

[17]

Frost and Sullivan. North American Wholesale Long Distance Voice Service Market - Gaining a Competitive Advantage Through Migration to VoIP, Dec 2004.

[18]

Frost and Sullivan. Trends in Wireline Substitution - North American Markets, August 2005.

[19]

T. Griffin and B. Premore. An experimental analysis of bgp convergence time. In Proceedings of IEEE ICNP, 2001.

Digital Library

[20]

U. Hengartner, S. Moon, R. Mortier, and C. Diot. Detection and Analysis of Routing Loops in Packet Traces. Technical Report TR02-ATL051001, Sprint ATL, 2002.

Digital Library

[21]

P. Huang, A. Feldmann, and W. Willinger. A Non-intrusive, Wavelet-based Approach to Detecting Network Performance Problems. In IMW, 2001.

Digital Library

[22]

International Telecommunication Union. Connection Integrity Objective for International Telephone Service. E.855, 1988.

[23]

International Telecommunication Union. Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality. In ITU-T Rec. P.862, 2001.

[24]

W. Jiang and H. Schulzrinne. Assessment of VoIP Service Availability in the Current Internet. In PAM, 2003.

[25]

M. Karol, P. Krishnan, and J. Li. Using Overlay Networks to Improve VoIP Reliability. In LNCS, 2004.

[26]

T. Kawata, S. Shin, A. G. Forte, and H. Schulzrinne. Improving the Capacity for VoIP Traffic in IEEE 802.11 Networks with Dynamic PCF. In IEEE WCNC, 2005.

[27]

K. Kondo and K. Nakagawa. A Speech Packet Loss Concealment Method Using Linear Prediction. In IEICI Trans. Inf. and Syst., volume E89-D.

Digital Library

[28]

N. Kushman, S. Kandula, D. Katabi, and B. Maggs. R-BGP: Staying Connected in a Connected World. In NSDI, April 2007.

Digital Library

[29]

C. Labovitz, A. Ahuja, A. Bose, and F. Jahanian. Delayed Internet Routing Convergence. In SIGCOMM, pages 175--187, 2000.

Digital Library

[30]

Y. Liang, E. Steinbach, and B. Girod. Multi-stream voice over IP using Packet Path Diversity. In IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing, 2001.

[31]

Z. Mao, R. Govindan, G. Varghese, and R. Katz. Route-flap Damping exacerbates Internet Routing Convergence. In ACM SIGCOMM, 2002.

Digital Library

[32]

A. Markopoulou, F. Tobagi, and M. Karam. Assessment of VoIP Quality over Internet Backbones. In INFOCOM, 2002.

[33]

I. Marsh and F. Li. Wide Area Measurements of Voice over IP Quality. Technical report, Swedish Inst of Computer Science, 2003.

[34]

M. Mintz-Habib, A. S. Rawat, H. Schulzrinne, and X. Wu. A VoIP Emergency Services Architecture and Prototype. In ICCCN, 2005.

[35]

E. Osborne and A. Simha. Traffic Engineering with MPLS. Cisco Press, 2002.

Digital Library

[36]

PacketCable. VoIP Availability and Reliability Model for PacketCable Architecture. Technical Report PKT-TR-VoIPPAR-W05-001012, 2000.

[37]

R. K. Rajendran et al. Performance Optimization of VoIP using an Overlay Network. Technical report, NEC, 2005.

[38]

H. Schulzrinne et al. RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications. In IETF RFC 1889, 1996.

[39]

S. Tao et al. Improving VoIP Quality Through Path Switching. In INFOCOM, 2005.

[40]

Teck-Kuen and D. C. Pheanis. Effects of Loss Characteristics on Loss-Recovery Techniques for VoIP. In ICNICONSMCL, 2006.

[41]

M. Varela, I. Marsh, and B. Grnvall. A Systematic Study of PESQ's Performance. In MESAQIN, 2006.

[42]

Vonage { IP Telephony/Voice over IP. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk652/tk701/technologies case study09186a00800b559e.shtml.

[43]

F. Wang, N. Feamster, and L. Gao. Quantifying the Effects of Routing Dynamics on end-to-end Internet Path Failures. Technical Report TR-05-CSE-03, University of Massachusetts, 2006.

[44]

F. Wang, Z. M. Mao, J. W. L. Gao, and R. Bush. A Measurement Study on the Impact of Routing Events on End-to-End Internet Path Performance. In SIGCOMM, 2006.

Digital Library

[45]

A. Wittman. Assuring VoIP Quality: Not There Yet. IT Architect, March 2005.

[46]

W. Xu and J. Rexford. Multi-path Interdomain Routing. In SIGCOMM, 2006.

Digital Library

[47]

X. Zhang and H. Schulzrinne. Voice over TCP and UDP. Technical Report CUCS-033-04, Columbia University, 2004.

Cited By

He SCunha IKatz-Bassett EVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)RPSLyzer: Characterization and Verification of Policies in Internet Routing RegistriesProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3689018(365-374)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689018
Tsiatsikas ZKaropoulos GKambourakis G(2022)The Effects of the Russo-Ukrainian War on Network Infrastructures Through the Lens of BGPComputer Security. ESORICS 2022 International Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-25460-4_5(81-96)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-25460-4_5
An HNa YLee HPerrig A(2021)Resilience Evaluation of Multi-Path Routing against Network Attacks and FailuresElectronics10.3390/electronics1011124010:11(1240)Online publication date: 24-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10111240
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Can you hear me now?!: it must be BGP

Recommendations

Voice quality measurement system for telephone service
CSTST '08: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Soft computing as transdisciplinary science and technology

Recently, plenty of voice quality measuring devices of VoIP(Voice over Internet Protocol) service is developed to support high quality VoIP service for communication. However, the existing voice quality measuring devices select the unique measurement ...
A study on QoS of VoIP networks: a random neural network (RNN) approach
SpringSim '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Spring Simulation Multiconference

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is predicted to be the replacement of the traditional PSTN telephone system. Quality of Service (QoS) of VoIP systems are more difficult to measure and implement compared to PSTN systems. The nature of QoS in VoIP ...
VoIP-quality of experience modeling: E-model and simplified E-model enhancement using bias factor

The E-model is a non-intrusive measurement method that many researchers have applied to the study of VoIP quality measurement. While the Simplified E-model is a modified version from the original, it can still be used as an alternative solution. ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 37, Issue 2

April 2007

99 pages

ISSN:0146-4833

DOI:10.1145/1232919

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2007 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 March 2007

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 37, Issue 2

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

57
Total Citations
View Citations
108
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)11
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 28 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

He SCunha IKatz-Bassett EVallina-Rodríguez NSuarez-Tángil GLevin DPelsser C(2024)RPSLyzer: Characterization and Verification of Policies in Internet Routing RegistriesProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3689018(365-374)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646547.3689018
Tsiatsikas ZKaropoulos GKambourakis G(2022)The Effects of the Russo-Ukrainian War on Network Infrastructures Through the Lens of BGPComputer Security. ESORICS 2022 International Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-25460-4_5(81-96)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-25460-4_5
An HNa YLee HPerrig A(2021)Resilience Evaluation of Multi-Path Routing against Network Attacks and FailuresElectronics10.3390/electronics1011124010:11(1240)Online publication date: 24-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10111240
Jiang PWang QHuang MWang CLi QShen CRen K(2021)Building In-the-Cloud Network Functions: Security and Privacy ChallengesProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2021.3127277109:12(1888-1919)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2021.3127277
Brenes JGarcia-Martinez ABagnulo MLutu APelsser C(2020)Power Prefixes Prioritization for Smarter BGP ReconvergenceIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2020.297966528:3(1074-1087)Online publication date: Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2020.2979665
Hart NRotsos CGiotsas VRace NHutchison D(2020)λBGP: Rethinking BGP programmabilityNOMS 2020 - 2020 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium10.1109/NOMS47738.2020.9110331(1-9)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/NOMS47738.2020.9110331
Padmanabhan RSchulman ALevin DSpring NWu JHall W(2019)Residential links under the weatherProceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication10.1145/3341302.3342084(145-158)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341302.3342084
Alali FAdams TFoley RKilper DWilliams RVeeraraghavan M(2019)Methods for Objective and Subjective Evaluation of Zero-Client ComputingIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29250837(94569-94582)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2925083
Jelassi SRubino G(2018)A perception-oriented Markov model of loss incidents observed over VoIP networksComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2018.06.009128(80-94)Online publication date: Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2018.06.009
Moubarak MElbayoumy AMegahed M(2018)Design and implementation of BGP novel control mechanism (BGP-NCM) based on network performance parametersAin Shams Engineering Journal10.1016/j.asej.2017.02.0089:4(2079-2091)Online publication date: Dec-2018
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asej.2017.02.008
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents