Utilizing DiffServ and SIP contact header for real-time fax traffic engineering

Abstract

This paper focuses on the transmission of real-time fax in IP networks. For this purpose, the best current practices, i.e., utilization of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the signaling protocol along with ITU-T T.38 recommendation, are adopted. Two traffic engineering measures: utilization of SIP contact header and DiffServ QoS architecture, are proposed to streamline the implementation of the real-time FoIP. Network simulation results show that the proposed architecture, compared to the "Best Effort" service, has much less transmission time and jitter, and packets received are in correct sequence. Moreover, SIP contact header reduces load on network's specialized resources. Therefore, this layout is a viable alternative for traditional PSTN fax.