Huawei Unified Communication from the perspective of the development of Softswitch Technology

The concept of softswitch was born

The concept of softswitch originated first in the United States. At that time, in the enterprise network environment, users used Ethernet-based phones to implement the PBX function through a set of Call Control Software Based on PC servers ). For such a set of equipment, the system does not need to separately lay the network, but can achieve unified management and maintenance only through sharing with the LAN, the overall cost is much lower than the traditional PBX. Because the enterprise network environment does not have high requirements on device reliability, billing, and management, it is mainly used to meet communication requirements and has a low device threshold. Many equipment vendors can provide such solutions, therefore, the ip pbx application has achieved great success. Inspired by the success of ip pbx, in order to improve the comprehensive operation efficiency of the network, the network development tends to be more reasonable and open, and better serve users. The industry has put forward the idea that the traditional switching device components are divided into call control and Media Processing, and standard protocols (MGCP and H.248) are used between them) softswitch (Softswitch) technology came into being because it mainly uses pure software for processing.

Rapid development of Softswitch

After the birth of softswitch, due to its low price, future technical direction, and multimedia business capabilities, the global telecommunications industry began to make large-scale network changes from, that is, replacing the original program-controlled switch. At present, many non-professional people are still impressed by the definition of softswitch in the industry during the 04 years. However, it has been 10 years since its birth. In the past 10 years, Softswitch technology has also advanced by leaps and bounds. Huawei, as one of the earliest leaders in program-controlled exchange technology, is also the earliest advocate of Softswitch technology and global commercialization.

Demands of Enterprise Informatization

With the development of modern technology, the pace of enterprise informatization is getting faster and faster, and various needs emerge one after another. Huawei extracts common functions that affect enterprise communication for development and customization. For example, a large enterprise has many people with the same name and surname, and how to quickly find the address book of the person you want to find becomes one of the enterprise's demands. There are many ways to contact people in any enterprise, such as through E-mail, PC soft terminals, landline phones, mobile phones, and video conferences, these various communication methods also make us feel disorganized when we contact each other, and we don't know which method should be used for convenience and convenience. With the popularization of smart terminals, modern people always feel that the terminal on the desktop is too OUT when they return to their desks, because smart phones are fashionable, designed avant-garde, and fully functional. There are still a lot of business people who seldom use computers at ordinary times. When one day they actually use the PC client, they find that the same software installed on their smart phones is totally different, inconvenient.

Huawei Unified Communication (UC): easy to use, unified interface, one-click access

In the past 10 years, Huawei has done a lot of pre-research and development for the enterprise market. What work has it done on the basis of the originally defined Softswitch? Huawei has made great improvements in terms of ease of use, user-friendly and concise features that directly affect consumers. For example, whether it is a PC, a smartphone, or an IP phone, the usage habits of the software client installed on the client and the interface are exactly the same. The customer only needs to be familiar with one of the usage habits, other terminals can also be operated at will, and some personalized development is carried out based on the characteristics of various terminals, the PC can be flexibly captured and edited, and the smart machine client is concise, all functions can be reached with one click, and the PAD client can be used for convenient IM and video conferences. Huawei also invited Apple's design team to design a new generation of IP phones on hard terminals, it is novel, fashionable, and tasteful, and has become the world's shortest IP Phone.

Huawei UC continues to lead the development of the communication industry

Huawei UC continues to lead the development of the communication industry. In addition to the full IP address, it is still exploring in popular fields such as BYOD, video Association, and collaboration, integrating video conferencing, mobile clients, and smart reality into one, provides customers with comprehensive, rich, and easy-to-use communication means. Security and reliability are also the focus of the industry in all-IP networks. Huawei UC deploys the relevant SBC and firewall devices to hide the core UC devices in the topology. Only SBC can be seen on the IP Internet, and hacker attacks can be prevented from the media stream and signaling stream. The speech is also encrypted to ensure that the intercepted speech cannot be identified and the communication security of enterprises is ensured. Dynamic voice quality monitoring, reporting, and dynamic gain adjustment ensure the reliability of speech. At the same time, dual-homing devices can be configured to ensure Remote Disaster Tolerance, thus ensuring the overall reliability.

Control and bearer separation, business control and call control separation

In the field of softswitch, the earliest popular architecture is control and bearer separation, business control and call control separation. In the NGN era, the previous work has been done in place. However, the latter has basically not been implemented in the industry, but part of the work has been separated. The basic and supplementary services of China Telecom are still implemented in Softswitch, it is not true until the IMS era. At the same time, the industry's NGN generally sets operators as service objects. Therefore, in terms of business applications, it cannot meet enterprises' value-added services. It can only use third-party servers to implement some value-added services, in this way, there are some defects in consistency and availability. In contrast, Huawei UC and value-added service servers are all self-developed and collaborated with office systems such as video and monitoring. In terms of architecture, IMS architecture is used to truly implement separation of business control and call control, at the same time, considering the cost of small and medium-sized enterprises, control and load can be separated, logically separated, and physically integrated, reducing the cost and difficulty of deployment for enterprises.

Through years of application in banking, large enterprises, and electric power fields, Huawei UC has accumulated profound experience in the voice and IP fields, in the future, UC will continue to improve and enhance its stability, architecture, and commercial use cases in the direction of IP, BYOD, video Association, and collaboration!