Home > News > Archive Euro News > 2001

Adax Addresses IP Telephony Quality Concerns With SCTP/T

Quality and reliability issues surrounding Voice over IP (VoIP) have been addressed by industry-leader, Adax, with the introduction of new convergence technology to provide voice-grade quality and integrity for IP-based telephony. Adax, whose signaling products lie at the heart of telecoms systems from giants such as Alcatel, Ericsson, Lucent and Nortel, has added SCTP/T to its portfolio of protocol software.

SCTP is one of the latest Internet Engineering Task Force defined protocols (IETF RFC 2960) and is a part of the SIGTRAN stack. The Adax implementation of SCTP for telecom, SCTP/T, not only conforms to IETF standards, it proactively addresses all the application concerns brought up in the IETF Applicability Statement of December 2000. SCTP/T includes many enhanced features that ensure superior performance in the transport of telephony signaling over IP.

"We believe in SCTP/T we have a superior product," said Robin Kent, Director of European operations at Adax. "We invite the market to scrutinise the technical capabilities of SCTP/T and its related hardware, and see how it can provide high quality and reliability convergence, enhancing competitive advantage."

With the introduction of SCTP/T, Adax customers can now build convergence gateways and softswitches, based on Adax’s HDC and ATM hardware, allowing customers to process traffic over T1, E1, OC3/STM-1, channelised T1/E1, and Ethernet interfaces.

SCTP/T operations are split between the kernel and the on-board processor(s), with the on-board processor taking over the cumbersome computational processes such as heartbeat processing, path-failure detection, Adler/32 bit checksum and CRC calculations, encryption, non-repudiation, and authentication. This split-level arrangement alleviates the burden on the telco server's CPU, giving enhanced performance, reliability and service.

SCTP/T is available for Adax’s PCI and cPCI versions of the HDC and ATM boards. An implementation with both HDC and ATM boards is capable of handling highly demanding telecommunications applications processing combinations of LAPB/D/V5, PPP, Frame Relay, X.25, SS7/MTP-2, Transparent PCM mode, SSCF-NNI, SSCOP, ATM, and SCTP/IP simultaneously. With user payload being downloaded through multiple channel/data streams, incidents of head-of-line blocking are minimised.