This award is to support a cooperative research between Dr. Emad Aboelela, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, Massachusetts and Dr. Nazih El-Derini, Department of Computer Science and Automatic Control, Faculty of Engineering, University of Alexandria, Alexandria, Egypt. The PIs will study redundant traffic encoding and marking for Voice over Internet Protocol Quality -of-Service. (VoIP) enables voice traffic to be carried over an IP network such as the global Internet. The objectives of the project are: 1. to identify the aspects that lead to poor voice quality through simulation and real implementation of VoIP connection between the research lab in the US and its counterpart in Egypt. 2. to increase the likelihood of a receiver to replace lost or delayed packets through generating a redundant stream as a duplicate of the original voice stream. 3. to decrease the overhead of the proposed QoS scheme through utilizing a low-bit-rate speech encoding technique for the redundant stream. 4. to decrease the probability that the same speech content gets lost, or delayed, from both the original and redundant voice streams. 5. to allow the receiver to reassemble the sent voice stream from either the original stream or duplicate stream through providing a packet sequencing technique. The solution is to be implemented mainly at the end hosts and can be supported with minimal changes to the infrastructure of the Internet. Preliminary experiments show that the proposed approach has relatively low overhead. In the Internet community, research and development has been devoted to enforce an acceptable QoS for the transmission of real-time multimedia streams (including voice), both at universities and major corporate and government laboratories, but the goal is still elusive. The QoS schemes can be categorized as resource reservation or prioritization, possibly along with traffic engineering. The PIs plan an innovative scheme to improve VoIP quality through applying various speech-encoding algorithms and utilizing different traffic engineering techniques.
Scope and broader impacts: The growth in IP-based services has been explosive, and it is projected that this market will continue to grow at an even higher rate for several years to come. Recent industry trends show that multimedia holds the potential for a wide range of applications. VoIP offers the potential to gain competitive advantage through the introduction of new services and application. The proposed project will create foundations for future research and collaboration between the research communities as well as the private sectors in Egypt and the US. The results of the project will be published in the project website to reach broad audiences in the research, educational, and private sector communities as well as in scientific journals. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities.
