Annual Mobicents Conference - 2011 - Sochi, Russia

Concluded another wonderful Mobicents conference at Sochi, Russia. This time it was biggest every participation from community and customers, each presented about their projects/products and how they leveraged mobicents platform. Thanks to every one for joining and making this experience rich! A big thanks to Oleg who made immaculate arrangements!

It was sad announcement from Rob Cardwell (JBCP Product Manager, RedHat) about sunsetting JBCP. However no surprise here as it was already communicated to existing customers sometime ago.

Like after every sunset is sunrise, TeleStax is born to take care of development, support, training and consultancy around Mobicents. It will be wrong to refer TeleStax as startup, as the founders were working on Mobicents at RedHat and resigned few months ago to keep focusing on Mobicents and take it to next level.

The conference started on 5th December with introduction round and then Ivelin presenting about Transitioning Mobicents leadership from RedHat to Telestax. Below is the agenda

Note : I will keep adding link to pictures and presentation as and when they are shared from respective guys

December 5th

• Transitioning Mobicents leadership from Red Hat to new company - Ivelin Ivanov
• Twilio Client and Cloud Communications - Jonas Borjesson, Twilio
• Multi Modal Video Conferencing - Nick Semergey and Alex Vinogradov, Avistar - Codeminders
• FOSS Telco Framework for Java Developers - Jason Goecke, Voxeo Labs
• Mobicents Diameter in MEVEO Open Source Billing - Sébastien Michéa, Manaty (Unfortunately Sebastien couldn't make for conference due to visa issues, however Jean did the presentation for them)
• Innovation with Mobicents at MTN - Amit Bhayani
• Unified Cloud Communications for SMBs - Silvano Girardi Jr, Inphonex
• Cool apps for Next Gen Intelligent Networks - Vilius Panevėžys, Elitnet
• MVNO complexities - Dmitri, Atel

December 6th and 7th was for mobicents core team to present the roadmap and future of various projects within mobicents platform

December 6th

• RestComm - Thomas Quintana
• From SIP Servlets to TelScale - Jean Deruelle
• SIP Load Balancing - Vladimir Ralev
• Container independent failover framework - Jean Deruelle
• CDI Telco Framework and Aquilian - George Vagenas

December 7th

• TelScale SNMP and JMX management - Jean Deruelle
• QE achievements, infrastructure review, frameworks, roadmap, expansion to community contributed resources - Luis Barreiro
• Media Server theory, practice, cloud considerations, design discussion, roadmap - Oleg and Julian
• JSLEE progress and roadmap - Eduardo Martins
• Diameter progress, popular use cases, roadmap - Alexandre Mendonca, Bartosz Baranowski
• SS7 progress, popular use cases, roadmap - Amit Bhayani, Sergey, Bartosz

December 8th was reserved for fun parts where the team visited Sochi downtown and walked on the shore of blacksea. Conference was hosted at Katerina Hotel located in picturesque Krasnaya Polyana which is approximately 40kms from Sochi Airport. If you want to spend some time away from hustle bustle of City, this is the place! However party animals cannot survive on this lonely place ;)

Already waiting for Conference 2012

Project ideas for Google Summer of Code 2009

Its that time of the year when students across the globe gets an opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code and get paid for executing the project that they always wanted to. This year too RedHat/JBoss has participated and has been accepted as Mentoring Organization.

Follow the RedHat page for GSoC 2009 here

There are many ideas that have been listed by JBoss here

The Mobicents Media Server team too has identified following Project Ideas where we are ready to mentor the students

Project Ideas

• Add Support for RTCP protocols to Mobicents Media Server
• Support for SRTP protocol to Mobicents Media Server
• The Automatic Speech Recognition engine to Mobicents Media Server. You can look at Sphinx-4 project which is open source

In addition the VoIP PBX project from Mobicents Sip Servlets listed on same page too is of interest to us. It uses Media Server for all of its media processing.

However these are not the only topics, if you have something in your mind and would like to execute as project on Mobicents Media Server, please feel free to drop us a line at amit dot bhayani at gmail dot com or oleg dot kulikoff at gmail dot com



All the best!

Mobicents Media Server 1.0.0.CR5 a step closer to GA (Stable) release

With the latest release of Mobicents Media Server 1.0.0.CR5 its just an inch away from finish line - GA (Stable) release. The CR4 was completely overhauled to achieve greater performance and CR5 is bug fix reported from CR4. In doing so there were number of modifications made such that the MSC API from Application Developers perspective doesn't change. The Announcement and IVR endpoint's in new MMS doesn't have transcoding capacity now. This was required to boost the performance. Also most of the time in Telco world the application developer knows precisely which codec will be used by end User Agent (UA) and hence use the pre-encoded audio file such that Audio Player reads this file, creates RTP packets and sends across to UA. If this is not the case than the application just has to front-end the Ann/IVR Endpoint with Packet Relay endpoint which still has transcoding capacity. The Announcement endpoint is capable of generating DTMF Tones. The Conference Endpoint is not modified and it too has transcoding capacity just like pre CR4. The Conference Endpoint has the DTMF detection and Audio Player such that Application can directly detect DTMF on Conf Endpoint or play the announcement.

We are very happy to announce that MMS can now easily achieve 100 concurrent announcements with transcoding. This test was done on my laptop which is 2GB Dell D620 mahine. We still have to do a test without transcoding and on real servers. If you want to test the performance of MMS in your environment please feel free to drop a line at amit dot bhayani at gmail dot com

For further details please look at http://groups.google.com/group/mobicents-public/browse_thread/thread/e6dd1ee52a357f53

Media Gateway Control Protocol Stack Performance improved

Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP, RFC 3435 and JSR 23: JAIN^TM MGCP API Specification) is the only piece as of now that connects the Mobicents Media Server (MMS) and remote application and hence the performance of MGCP stack is crucial for MMS to be called as GA (Stable). Before MMS CR4 is released, the team is doing everything possible to make MMS performance reach the magical figure. In attempt MGCP stack was also scrutinized for every little details, tweaked and modified to bring it upto the mark. And voila! MGCP stack performance test showed 175 CPS on my Dell D630 Laptop which has 4GB RAM and Linux OS.

Above shown is the images of test scenario that shows through put in number of calls completed per second.

The flow of message (equivalent to one call) in test is

Call Agent (CA) <------------> Media Gate Way (MGW)

CRCX ------------>
<----------- CRCX Response RQNT ------------>
<----------- RQNT Response DLCX ------------>
<----------- DLCX Response While this may not be the flow of every MGCP cycle in real world, but covers the most generic scenario. The test is available at http://code.google.com/p/mobicents/source/browse/#svn/trunk/servers/media/controllers/mgcp/mgcp-stack/src/test/java/org/mobicents/mgcp/stack/test/concurrency

Steps to execute test

1. checkout the code from http://code.google.com/p/mobicents/source/browse/trunk/servers/media/controllers/mgcp/mgcp-stack/ and execute 'mvn install' from mgcp-stack directory
   
2. Modify the /mgcp-stack/ant-build-config.properties to point to correct jar file's
3. Start the MGW by executing command 'ant mgw' from /concurrency folder
4. Start the CA by executing command 'ant ca' form /concurrency folder
   

By default the number of MGCP calls(cycles) the test will execute is 10000 (look at NDIALOGS parameter of CA.java) and the concurrent cycles is capped at 100, look at MAXCONCURRENTCRCX parameter of CA.java

Next in-line is measuring and improving performance of MGCP Resource Adaptor.

Performance of Mobicents Media Server 1.0.0.CR3

Yesterday I did a performance test of Mobicent Media Server 1.0.0.CR3 on my laptop (Dell D620, Dual Core, 2GB RAM) with server and mms load test client running on same machine. The test was made for 50 concurrent announcements of an average length of announcement 3.74 Seconds. The codec used by UA test client was G711 A-law. The test lasted for 34487595 seconds or 9.58 hours (I stopped test and machine after this as I wanted to move to office ;) ). Number of announcements completed were 231202 out of which only 292 failed which means failure rate of 0.1262 %. The number of successful announcement were 231198. The load on CPU was on an average 60%. This indicates that max load on MMS can be further increased and hence more concurrent announcement

If we calculate the Erlang Number based on this statistics 3.74 (avg announcement in sec) * 231202 (completed announcement ) * 1000 (convert to milli sec ) / 34487595 = 25E. The call set-up and tear down takes time. The signaling used was MGCP stack on client/test tool side and MGCP RA + mgcp-controller-sbb on MMS server side.

These are definitely much better numbers compared to what MMS was capable of before CR3 release.

Performance is always relative to what you are trying to achieve. Its directly proportional to environment, application and fine tunning in addition to what one is trying to measure. Try the MMS performance in your environment, the load test tool is available at http://code.google.com/p/mobicents/source/browse/#svn/trunk/servers/media/test-suite

Soon we will execute load test on actual server and expecting the numbers to be much greater than reported here ... stay tunned!