P2P/Grid-based overlay architecture to support VoIP services in large-scale IP networks

Communication services such as, Voice over IP (VoIP), over the Internet have gained much attention in recent years, as next generation Internet applications are requiring the integration of voice and data in the single IP infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a Peer-to-Peer (P2P)/Grid-based architecture to efficiently provide VoIP services in large-scale IP networks. Particularly, our technologies include: (1) a multi-overlay architecture that leverages the resources/capabilities of individual VoIP components. (2) We design and develop several models and protocols for realizing VoIP services in our architecture. We conduct extensive performance evaluations on different schemes proposed. The evaluation results show that the load-aware weight-based call routing scheme can achieve much better performance than static selection schemes in terms of average call routing delay. The experimental results also demonstrate that the P2P+ Hierarchy model for conferencing applications can achieve better performance than all other models in terms of minimizing the network bandwidth overhead. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.