Everything Over IP

It's well known how IP has changed the way people communicate. After data

communication the buzz was VoIP. Now VoIP has become an integral part of our

lives and people are hooked on to VoIP without even realizing. Now the latest

buzz is Video over IP as well as on mobiles. In this story we look at some of

the hot communication trends taking place over IP and some of latest

developments which will pave the way to what we like to call 'Everything over

IP.'

TV on the move



The announcement by MTNL to offer a bouquet of interactive personalized

television and video phone services in Mumbai and Delhi has had two effects-for

one, it has served as a wake up call to the telecom industry that the time is

ripe to converge telephony, TV and Internet to create a new slate of value added

offerings to Indian customers. The second, larger effect is to tell consumers

that they've entered a new era where video and TV can reach to them anywhere,

anytime through Internet. When Vint Cerf, regarded as the father of the Internet

and co-inventor of TCP/IP visited India last year, he sported a Tee which said,

“IP on everything,” a rather rude message with a serious thought that Internet

Protocol had already become the single most pervasive standard to communicate

data and entertain world's connected billions. Hand in hand with its recent

mobile TV offering, MTNL has also launched, in partnership with Aksh Optifibre,

a new service called V Spyk, a video phone service in Mumbai and Delhi. For Rs

499, subscribers are being offered IPTV, VoIP as well as 50 MB broadband

services.

While private telecom providers are still reeling from the head start that

public sector companies seem to have achieved, it seems like TRAI may object to

MTNL's IPTV service since they are a basic service operator while IPTV is a

value added service. Meanwhile, IP is being harnessed in creative ways to move

video and TV content, releasing it from constraints of place and time. The most

compelling product in this space is Slingbox (a creation of India based

engineers of Sling Media), a set top box which allows users to transfer all TV

feeds from cable or satellite operators to any PC, laptop or mobile phone,

anywhere in the world via Internet.

A competing product is Hava from another India-based developer, Monsoon

Multimedia, which adds Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g) to provide wireless home networking

capability. Even without these add on devices, it is possible to receive a

variety of TV feeds via the Internet. The most compelling of these free web

services is Joost, a creation of Niklas Zennstromand and Janus Friis, inventors,

who in an earlier era, invented P2P with Kazaa. Joost has already tied up with a

100 TV channels including MTV, CNN and Sony Pictures, and in the months to come,

the Net is slated to become the chosen vehicle to reach television content to

customers wherever they are.

A recent report of Springboard Research conducted across 6 metros in India

found that over 85% of mobile phone users in the country were ready to invest in

new handsets to be able to get their most popular TV content on-the-move. With

Indians buying mobile phones at 8 million a month, it is clear that the

potential for IPTV in India may become one of the fastest growing markets for

mobile and Net based services.

With vendors launching cell phones that support Mobile TV, it is all set to become the next big thing

Telepresence



Ever since Cisco launched its Telepresence solution to provide real life

experience in video conferencing, there has been a lot of buzz around such

solutions and other vendors have also joined the bandwagon. HP came out with its

Halo telepresence solution, Nortel has started providing telepresence services

and so are many other video conferencing companies such as Polycom and Lifesize.

HP this month launched its new telepresence offering called Halo

Collaboration Studio. The product is meant for enterprises with geographically

dispersed workforce and the product can be easily installed at remote locations

without the need for any expertise. Just like other Halo products, this solution

too uses Halo Video Exchange Network with a dedicated collaboration channel that

consists of an HP collaboration software and a high-definition collaboration

screen. Since Halo is a managed end to end solution, enterprises do not have to

worry about maintenance and upgradation of their infrastructure.

In India too telepresence is catching up, and March 08 saw Polycom launching

its RealPresence Experience High Definition solution and Tata Communications

launching Cisco-certified TelePresence network services in India.

Video conferencing on mobiles



Modern cellphones enable you to do everything a regular desktop PC does,

with the added advantage of mobility. Lately the buzz has been around

technologies that allow video conferencing between two cellphones, and between a

cellphone and a PC. The latter happens over the Internet. Now many of the latest

camera-equipped cellphones are ready for video conferencing as they are designed

with a rotating camera. Some also ship with a compact stand which houses a

camera lens. You can mount a cellphone and initiate a conference call. You will

be able to see the participant and yourself on the cellphone screen. Your images

will be transmitted to the viewer on the other side via the camera on the stand.

Scent-Dome devices come with a cartridge containing 20 scents. By mixing these, the device creates fragrances according to the content

Mobile video conferencing is no longer limited to mobile phones. Vendors are

also launching similar portable mobile video conferencing solutions. Tandberg

has come out with a device called FieldView which is meant to provide real time

collaboration amongst experts and field agents. This can help enterprises in

making quick decisions and get expert advice instantly on the situation. The

company is targeting companies in manufacturing, education, research and

development.

IP storage for video surveillance



Demand for video surveillance has increased considerably in enterprises.

This has been due to reasons such as the need to meet compliance standards or

the fact that enterprises can easily deploy IP cameras and use their existing

cabling for carrying video signals. Enterprises are readily deploying web based

IP surveillance solutions as they provide several advantages over traditional

CCTV solutions. Administrators can remotely view and manage IP surveillance

systems, the system itself is fast, ease of use, etc. Further, IP video

surveillance is also being used as proof in lawsuits and at times is required to

meet compliance. However, it also causes problems such as storing images

generated from IP video surveillance, as even a single IP camera can generate

more than 20 GB of data in a single day. Also, as a video surveillance system

performs constant write operations on a storage disk, using common storage

devices such as NAS can degrade the performance of a video surveillance system

as these devices are designed for environments where balanced read/write

operations take place.

To solve such issues vendors are now offering dedicated storage solutions for

video surveillance. These storage solutions are designed to work with existing

infrastructure of an enterprise and can support thousands of cameras working

together. They support features such as replication, clustering, thin

provisioning, load balancing and failover. Vendors are now also providing a

complete solution for video surveillance which includes everything from an IP

camera to a media server as well as a storage solution.

Synthesized Scent over IP



There has been a lot of talk about how soon physical interactions over IP

would be possible and also a lot of research has been going on this subject, to

provide Touch-to-Touch, Motion-to-Motion and similar interactions. Last year a

project called touch (http://phy2phy.wikidot.com/touch) demonstrated a device

which allows two users to touch each other's fingers over the Internet. However,

when these products would be commercially available, is hard to say at this

point. There have been a few commercial products launched that deliver aroma

over your desktop. A company called TriSenx has created a device called Scent

Dome which has cartridges of 20 scents and by cleverly mixing these; it releases

fragrances that provide a unique experience to users. So, whenever a user goes

to a Scent Enabled Website (SEC), the device will spray the fragrance into the

air as specified in the content, thus bringing a tinge of reality to the

otherwise virtual experience. Another company, called Telewest, is soon going to

release ScentMail which will use the same device to let users send fragrant

email.

Similarly, another company, called AromaJet, is creating a device called

Pinoke which will provide a new gaming experience by spraying aroma according to

the environment in a particular game. As aromas trigger new emotions in human

beings, such devices could make games even more addictive.

Teredo Tunneling



NAT has been used to overcome ipv4 address shortage as it acts as an interface
between Internet and the local network. It translates private address of local

network to the public address of ISP. Now that ipv6 is a reality, overcoming the

ipv4 to ipv6 transition is an important issue. This issue was resolved to

certain extent by 6to4 protocol, that could be implemented on NAS.



Teredo Tunneling is a protocol that gives ipv6 connectivity to nodes that
connect through NAT devices that do not understand ipv6. In this protocol, ipv6

packets are encapsulated into ipv4 UDP datagrams that can route through NAT and

ipv4 Internet. Teredo was introduced because 6to4 protocol, that is most common

ipv6 over ipv4 protocol, was economically and technically difficult to implement

on most NAT devices. Teredo in turn is implemented on nodes itself that can

easily understand the encapsulated packets and thus gain ipv6 connectivity

without NAT being ipv6 aware.

Swapnil Arora and Vishnu Anand with help from Sandeep Kaul