Four practical suggestions for deploying VoIP projects for Enterprises

Four practical suggestions for deploying VoIP projects for Enterprises

Under the impact of the economic crisis, many enterprises also regard deploying IP phones as an effective means to reduce enterprise management costs. Although IP Phones use existing network infrastructure. However, to improve the use of IP phones, we often need to optimize the existing network facilities. You need to add necessary devices when necessary. I recently made an IP project book for a customer and planned to implement it in the near future. After researching the existing network conditions of the enterprise, the author puts forward the following five suggestions.

I. VOIP and voice signaling communication traffic first

Although the enterprise network deployment is complete, the performance is also acceptable. However, traffic has never been managed before. For example, the priorities of various traffic in an enterprise network are the same. Because the applications currently deployed by enterprises do not have strict bandwidth requirements for such applications as voice calls or video conferences, the existing management mode can meet the daily needs of enterprise users. However, if you want to use an IP phone, the current network management mode is not perfect. The author suggests that enterprises should use routers to manage network traffic, especially to prioritize data streams based on their importance, so as to reduce the impact of other information flows on voice communication. For example, if an enterprise permits the operation of btsoftware or does not strictly filter and control the information flow generated by it, this will affect the communication quality of IP phones. Because it will generate a large amount of data streams in a short time.

Therefore, even if the enterprise's network performance is so good, it still needs to manage network traffic when deploying an IP voice phone. In all circumstances, make sure that the VOIP and voice communication streams must take precedence over all other communication streams. For example, you can use Cisco Network Technology's priority queue. Priority queuing is a technology that processes and schedules frames in an outbound queue with priority. After the queue is specified as a strict priority queue, the frames in the queue are preferentially transmitted by the vswitch or vro and other network devices. After the transmission is completed, the queue will provide services for other queues. For IP phones, this technology can be used to ensure the priority of their VOIP and voice communication flows. You can add a voice communication stream to the priority queue so that network devices can process the data stream first. However, when using priority management, you need to pay attention to the monitoring of network traffic at ordinary times. If the language information flow is not controlled at this time (for example, the traffic increases rapidly due to the impact of viruses), all bandwidth will be occupied by the voice communication flow, in addition, services in the non-priority queue will have no bandwidth.

Although setting the voice communication stream as the highest priority leads to security risks, such management is necessary to improve the quality of voice communication. At this time, the network administrator only needs to enhance security management to improve the security of this configuration.

Ii. configure a VLAN for the VoIP communication stream

A virtual LAN can improve the utilization of network bandwidth because it can shield unnecessary information traffic. To this end, if enterprise conditions permit, it is recommended that VoIP communication be moved to an independent VLAN when deploying an IP phone to reduce the adverse effects of other information flows on this VoIP information flow. If you use a Cisco professional IP phone device, you can use the language VLAN, that is, the auxiliary VLAN. If an enterprise's network device does not have this function, you can also create a common VLAN, and then put the voice information stream into the virtual LAN for management. However, when configuring voice VLANs, you must pay attention to compatibility issues with other VLANs. In addition, you still need to manage the priority of protocols on enterprise-level routers or key network devices. Let it still process voice information first.

A Cisco vswitch supports a unique feature called a language VLAN, also known as a secondary VLAN. As the name suggests, it is used to process voice information flows. It adds IP phones and other common workstations to different virtual LAN. By using the language VLAN, you can add the VoIP communication stream of the interface port to another virtual LAN without configuring the virtual LAN. By adding an IP phone to an independent IP subnet or virtual LAN, you can not only improve the effect of VoIP communication, but also easily troubleshoot faults. By using the language VLAN function, network administrators can centrally place various physical devices and maintain different logical topologies for voice terminals and data terminals, this provides an efficient way to manage multi-service networks. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you manually create a virtual LAN to manage VoIP information traffic even if the existing network device does not have a voice VLAN. The results are similar.

Iii. Conduct continuous network monitoring to improve call Performance

To improve the performance of VoIP calls, it is best to ensure that sufficient network bandwidth is available. Generally, If you deploy a VoIP project, you 'd better monitor the bandwidth usage. Under normal traffic conditions, the bandwidth usage should not exceed 75% or 80%. Why? In the case of voice communication, there is usually a burst of traffic for various reasons. In fact, other applications also have sudden traffic spikes. Some traffic is predictable, such as regular file backup and remote database backup. However, some traffic is unpredictable, such as the increase in network traffic caused by a large amount of software or viruses downloaded from the FTP server. Therefore, bandwidth management cannot be full, but a certain amount of available bandwidth should be reserved. Based on my experience, in order to ensure the effect of VoIP communication, it is recommended that the bandwidth usage should not exceed 75% at ordinary times. If the bandwidth is exceeded, some effective measures should be taken to reduce the bandwidth usage.

When considering the bandwidth usage of VoIP, you must consider the bandwidth occupied by the voice carrier stream and the bandwidth occupied by the call control signaling. The speech carrier stream is composed of RTP data packets that contain actual speech samples. In short, the voice data actually transmitted. Call control signaling is a number of commands used to control voice communication. The specific Protocol depends on the call endpoint. Call control functions include creating, maintaining, removing, and redirecting calls. When evaluating the VOIP Bandwidth supply, we need to consider not only the data stream of voice communication, but also the call control communication flow.

Iv. reduce latency and jitter

VoIP communication streams have strict requirements on latency and jitter, that is, there are strict requirements on Packet Delay changes, sometimes even more demanding than latency. To improve the quality of VoIP communication, we sometimes have to use classification, queuing, congestion monitoring, traffic integer and compression technologies in the enterprise network to optimize the network performance. Such measures can reduce packet loss rate, data delay, jitter, and so on. However, even with the most perfect configuration and combination, it can also reduce the effect and cannot be completely avoided. Therefore, the network administrator can minimize latency and jitter to improve the effect of VoIP communication. It should be noted that if the VoIP technology is used, the criteria for this evaluation need to be adjusted. If you do not use VOIP (or video applications), the latency or jitter requirements are not very strict. However, to improve the application performance of VoIP, this standard is much stricter. Therefore, when deploying VoIP projects, enterprises usually need to optimize the network performance. Therefore, after the project is successfully implemented, the user will feel that not only does the network performance decrease due to the use of VoIP projects, but also improves. This is mainly because the overall network performance of the enterprise is improved.

 

In short, if you deploy a VoIP project directly in the enterprise's existing network architecture and management mode, the effect will often be compromised. To improve the call performance of VoIP, network administrators often need to optimize the existing network of an enterprise, including the network architecture and management mode. The preceding suggestions can help network administrators to complete the assignment. However, the above is only based on the performance of VoIP communication, without concerning its security. If you have this requirement, I will talk about the security protection of voice communication in subsequent articles.