True to its title, this book guides readers through the technologies and applications of voice and video over Internet protocol (VoIP). It is a comprehensive work based on the teaching and research experiences of the authors, and an excellent resource for understanding and practicing key techniques and tools for VoIP. The ten chapters include hundreds of problems and 11 illustrative worked examples.

The first five chapters deal with fundamental techniques related to various aspects of VoIP. Chapter 6 discusses the core concepts of VoIP quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE). The seventh chapter reviews the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) and mobile VoIP. The last three chapters deal with case studies that outline procedural steps for laboratory work related to VoIP. The illustrative worked examples, end-of-chapter problems, and references provide a basic foundation, enabling readers to check their understanding and explore further. The authors should have provided the answers to a few selected problems to help student readers assess their level of understanding. They should have also included a comparison between the session initiation protocol (SIP) and the H.323 protocol from the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) in chapter 5, to make it a comprehensive chapter on VoIP signaling.

Chapter 1 presents the basics of VoIP and briefly discusses four popular VoIP tools: Microsoft Lync, Skype, Google Talk, and X-Lite. It also illustrates the growth in VoIP revenues and subscribers, and the traffic distribution of protocols.

Chapter 2 deals with speech compression, which is essential for understanding VoIP technologies and their applications. The authors cover different coding techniques and summarize the key features of standards for narrowband, wideband, and fullband codecs from ITU-T, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The chapter includes three illustrative examples.

Chapter 3, “Video Compression,” discusses the need for media compression, presents basic concepts for video compression, and describes video compression standards from ITU-T, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). This chapter also includes three illustrative examples.

Chapter 4, “Media Transport for VoIP,” presents key concepts of the real-time transport protocol (RTP) and its associated RTP control protocol (RTCP), together with RTP header analysis and RTCP report examples. It concludes with the basic concept of compressed RTP (cRTP). The chapter includes two illustrative examples.

Chapter 5 discusses IETF’s SIP, which enables real-time applications and is associated with the session description protocol (SDP). It illustrates SIP architecture, network elements, and associated servers, and includes sections on SDP constituents and SIP message flow.

Chapter 6 on VoIP QoE is the most significant contribution by the authors. It will be very useful to prospective designers of VoIP applications. The authors clearly distinguish between QoS and QoE, by defining these metrics and enumerating their characteristics. The chapter illustrates how to calculate QoS metrics through practical approaches, and discusses the factors affecting voice quality and methods for assessing voice quality both subjectively and objectively. It includes three illustrative examples.

Chapter 7 introduces IMS and mobile VoIP, and describes the IMS architecture, elements, and services. It includes a section on mobile access networks, covering standards such as the global system for mobile communications (GSM) and the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS).

Chapters 8 to 10 describe three case studies that would be very helpful for students performing laboratory work for hands-on experience. In chapter 8, the authors present a case study on building a VoIP system that involves Asterisk, open-source private branch exchange (PBX) software, and X-Lite, a proprietary freeware VoIP softphone. A section illustrating a laboratory scenario guides the reader through the process of starting and stopping Asterisk, and making calls between SIP phones and between SIP phones and analog phones. The illustrations and procedural steps are easy to understand and emulate.

Chapter 9 amounts to a sequel of the previous chapter, with analysis and assessment of voice and video quality. It begins with an introduction to Wireshark, a free network protocol analyzer, and then describes the laboratory scenario for examining SIP messages during the SIP registration process, the SIP invite process, and message flows between two or more SIP phones. This chapter concludes with three lab sessions for assessing two QoS parameters, packet loss and delay variation.

Chapter 10 concludes the book with an introduction to the open-source IMS core architecture and a discussion of its central components. The authors also describe Android and illustrate its architecture. A section on a lab scenario demonstrates how to build a testbed for voice and video IMS communication, and the subsequent section demonstrates how to make voice and video calls between Android-based mobile handsets.

This book could serve as a textbook for students or a reference for practitioners.