Interface[s] Montréal

Audio and video IP

Jean-Charles Grégoire

inrs-emt, Telecommunications

Audio/Video IP: which quality, and at what price?

View the presentation [In French]

Telecommunication services convergence, that is, their joint deployment over a unique infrastructure, is an old goal of the industry and finally seems to come of age. IP networks offer a unique foundation which ­ should ­ support combined offers of services of various nature. IP technology, however, intrinsically doesn’t offer any performance guarantees, and hence application quality. Residential (Internet) access operators currently only offer discrimination based on the size of the access pipe to the home, hence throughput indistinctively of active applications. In the commercial world, various levels of services are used to guarantee compliance to performance requirements of such applications as voice over IP or videoconference. Network operators offer inter-networking services to bridge corporate networks and preserve such quality constraints ­ for a price. However, we more and more often see home A/V applications with a quality users can apparently live well with, without special cost and network requirements, beyond high speed. Between these extremes, we have a large spectre of possibilities which we explore in a project from the perspective of management, or cost, as well as user satisfaction (quality). This presentation will present the issues involved and our investigation of the subject.

Jean-Charles Grégoire received his Master’s Degree in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo and his PhD from the Swiss Federal Polytechnique Institute, Lausanne. He has been with INRS-EMT (Telecommunications) since 1990 and a professor at this institute since 1992.
Through INRS’s former partnership with Nortel, he has been involved in network management and embedded applications projects where he contributed his expertise in distributed systems, formal modeling and protocol design. This work later evolved towards exploration of performance issues for IP-based networks and applications (e.g. VoIP) and issues of QoS.

In 2002 he was on leave with Bell Canada ­ Emerging Technologies where he was working on innovative multi-service networking solutions for Bell’s corporate customers. He is currently on leave with Montreal’s International Institute of Telecommunications working on new application environments for 3G Wireless Systems.