VPN-1/FireWall-1 can be configured to enable Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic in which of the following
environments? (Choose two)
A.
SIP
B.
Q.931
C.
G.723
D.
DiffServ QOS
E.
H.323
Explanation:
VoIP Methods
VoIP incorporates
signaling
, compression and encoding standards. Most
users refer to the VoIP methods by the signaling standards that control them.
Two popular signaling standards are currently in use:
_
H.323
, an
International Telecommunications Union (ITU)
standard
_
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
, an
Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF)
standard
Neither of these signaling standards has been exclusively adopted by the
Internet community.
Visit
http://www.itu.int/home/index.html
for more information about H.323,
and
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc3261.txt
for more information about SIP.
Which should you use? That question may be moot in the near future
because the protocols may be converging. H.323 v3 has addressed some of
its shortcomings, which were initial advantages to using SIP. SIP seems to be
addressing some of its shortcomings as well. Whether these methods converge
or not, FireWall-1 currently supports both standards. In the following
sections, we’ll discuss each standard in more detail.
H.323
H.323 is the most popular IP telephony protocol and has been approved by
the world governments as the international standard for voice, video and
data conferencing. H.323 has the flexibility of sending multimedia communications
over the Internet and integrating well with the PSTN.When H.323 was developed in the mid-1990s, its creators hoped to produce
a next-generation protocol. Version 1 of H.323 was developed with a
focus on multimedia communications and interoperability with other multimedia
protocols and services. The version 1 standard was accepted in
October 1996.
The emergence of VoIP applications and IP telephony has set the guidelines
for a revision of the H.323 specification. With the development of
VoIP, new requirements emerged, such as providing communication
between a PC-based phone and a phone on a traditional switched circuit network;
but the lack of a standard for VoIP made most of the products with
these requirements incompatible. Such requirements subsequently forced the
need for a standard for IP telephony. Version 2 of H.323, a packet-based
multimedia communications system, was defined to accommodate these
additional requirements and was accepted in January 1998.The power of H.323 lies in its extensibility, flexibility of centralized and/
or decentralized control, ease of integration with Internet protocols, worldwide
acceptance, and technical capability to provide voice, video, and data
convergence. In today’s market, H.323 is the leader in multimedia communications
and carries billions of minutes of voice, video, and data conferencing
traffic over IP networks every month.
SIP
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the IETF protocol for IP telephony. It only
supports IP-based phones. It has a smaller footprint than H.323 so it’s faster
and more scalable. The problem lies in the fact that it’s a newer protocol, and
therefore fewer products exist that use it. However, SIP addresses some of
the shortcomings of H.323 by making users easier to identify, making it easier
to connect two circuit-switched networks across an IP network, and decreasing
the delay in call setup time.
SIP identifies users with a Hierarchical URL. This URL is based on a user’s
phone number or host name and looks similar to an e-mail address (for
example,
SIP: [email protected]
). Figure below illustrates the SIP call process.
When a call is made, the caller initiates it with an invite request. This
request contains the information necessary for the person you’re calling to
join the session: the media types and formats for the call, the destination for
the media data, and perhaps requests for using H.261 video and/or G.711
audio. The invite request is sent to the user’s SIP server. Because you include
your available features in the invite request, the negotiation of the connection
takes place in a single transaction thus call setup time is decreased (approximately
100 milliseconds).
The SIP server may or may not be a proxy server. A SIP proxy server
receives the request and figures out the user’s location using its internal algorithms.
A non-proxy SIP server functions as a redirect server in that it sends
back to the user the SIP URL that the user uses to query. In both the redirect
and proxy server cases, the server’s address is obtained by querying the
Domain Name Service (DNS).
Once the SIP URL is found, the request finally makes it to the personyou’re trying to call. If the person picks up the call, the receiver’s client
responds to the invite request with the capabilities of its software (videoconferencing,
whiteboarding,and so forth), and the connection is established.
SIP has two features that really make it unique:
_
It can split an incoming call so that multiple extensions can be rung at
once. When the invite request comes in, the SIP server can return to the
initiator of the call a Web Interactive Voice Response (IVR) page,
which contains extensions of different departments or users in a list.
All you have to do is click on the link to call the appropriate person or
department.
_
It can return different media types.
SIP is simple and easy to deploy because its only job is to identify the user
and set up the call; it relies on other protocols and applications to manage the
call. It utilizes existing DNS instead of having to create a separate database
for telephony. It also interfaces with circuit-switched networks (the PSTN)
more easily than H.323. Does this mea SIP is the way to go? Not necessarily.
It is not widely available, and (the biggest drawback at this point) it must
“de-throne” Microsoft. Every version of Windows that ships has an H.323
client as part of the package (it’s free!). Whether a company will purchase
another client all depends on its needs and what it wants to accomplish with
IP telephony.
While H.323 is the accepted VoIP protocol today, many people think that SIP will
be the VoIP protocol of the future. Most of the larger vendors are developing
SIP-based solutions if they haven’t already. It will be beneficial to understand
both protocols to make a decision on what kind of VoIP solution to deploy
