IAX-Based Peer-to-Peer VoIP Architecture

Nowadays, Voice over IP (VoIP) constitutes a privileged field of service innovation. One benefit of the VoIP technology is that it may be deployed using a centralized or a distributed architecture. The majority of today‟s VoIP systems are deployed using the client–server centralized architecture. One of the most efficient approaches used in the deployment of centralized VoIP systems is based on the use of IAX (Inter-Asterisk Exchange), an opensource signaling/data exchange protocol. Even though they are currently widely used, client-server VoIP systems suffer from many weaknesses such as the presence of single points of failure, an inefficient resources management, and system non-scalability. In order to help the development of scalable and reliable VoIP systems, the development community starts tending towards the deployment of the VoIP service using a peer-to-peer distributed architecture. The aim of this paper is to develop an IAX-based peer-to-peer VoIP architecture, an optimized VoIP architecture that takes advantage of the benefits of the IAX protocol and those of the peer-to-peer distribution model.