In past years, video conferencing has been something of a novelty, and there has been a certain tolerance for quality problems. As audio and video conferencing move more into the mainstream, however, customers and end users will demand greater performance, reliability, security, and scalability from their systems.
Voice and Video Conferencing Fundamentals provides readers with in-depth insight into the conferencing technologies and associated protocols. The information provided will enable information technology managers and technicians to understand basic concepts of video conferencing. The characteristics of video streams, encoding and decoding schemes, and conference control features are important aspects of deployment. The valuable information found in this book will prove extremely helpful during deployment and when performing vendor evaluations and making buying decisions.
Voice and Video Conferencing Fundamentals presents the architectural and technology basics of implementing audio and video conferencing over IP networks. Written by technical leaders who have years of experience in voice and video conferencing systems at Cisco, this book delivers the most authoritative coverage of the conferencing technologies. Professionals who are working or starting to work on these areas will find clear discussions of the concepts and principles of audio and video conferencing systems. More-comprehensive coverage is given for the advanced video architectures, such as emerging video codecs, audio and video synchronization, and distributed implementations. Related protocols, such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and H.323, with specifics on how to use them for conference signaling, are also explained in detail.
The book has three major goals:
To provide an understanding of different video conferencing deployment models, including centralized and distributed architectures, by using real-world examples.
To explain how video conferencing infrastructure uses signaling standards to establish synchronized, secure conference connections. The book uses call flow diagrams to show each signaling message needed to create a conference.
To provide a comparison of the most widely used video codecs, in a concise reference format.
This book is intended for use by network and system administrators, development and technical support engineers, Cisco customers, solution partners, and graduate students who are involved in the design, development, deployment, and support of audio and video conferencing products.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the conferencing models and introduces the basic concepts. Chapters 2 through 8 are the core chapters and can be read in any order. If you intend to read them all, the order in the book is an excellent sequence to use.
The chapters cover the following topics:
Chapter 1, “Overview of Conferencing Services”—. This chapter reviews the elementary concepts of conferencing, describing the various types of conferences and the features found in each. It also provides an overview of endpoint types and their characteristics.
Chapter 2, “Conferencing System Design and Architecture”—. This chapter reviews conferencing system design and the underlying components used in their construction.
Chapter 3, “Fundamentals of Video Compression”—. This chapter discusses the basics of video compression algorithms used by four major codecs: H.261, H.263, H.264, and MPEG-4 part 2. This chapter also includes a discussion of scalable video codecs.
Chapter 4, “Media Control and Transport”—. This chapter discusses the basics of Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) and Real-Time Transport Control Protocol (RTCP) and their usage in conferencing systems. This chapter also includes a discussion of RTP packetization formats for video codecs and different types of conferencing devices.
Chapter 5, “Signaling Protocols: Conferencing Using SIP”—. This chapter discusses the fundamentals of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and its relevance to audio and video conferencing. The session description formats for the video codecs are covered in detail with examples.
Chapter 6, “Signaling Protocols: Conferencing Using H.323”—. This chapter provides a brief overview of the H.323 protocol, with an emphasis on conferencing systems. It also describes the mechanisms for creating and managing media connections.
Chapter 7, “Lip Synchronization in Video Conferencing”—. This chapter analyzes the end-to-end data pipeline of a video conferencing system and discusses the process of achieving lip synchronization in an RTP-based video conferencing product.
Chapter 8, “Security Design in Conferencing”—. This chapter goes into depth on many aspects of video conferencing security, including encryption, authentication, attack prevention, firewall traversal, and network-level hardening.
Appendix A, “Video Codec Standards”—. This appendix explains the detailed operation of four major codecs: H.261, H.263, H.264, and MPEG-4 part 2.