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Take a Look at This Educational VoIP Lab

You rarely hear of academic education for VoIP and IP Telephony. Here is one source if you are in the Chicago area: the VoIP laboratory that is part of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Center for Professional development. The VoIP Lab is located at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Campus, which is a satellite (in Wheaton, Illinois) of Illinois Institute of Technology's Main Campus in Chicago. The Rice Campus caters to working professional graduate and upper-level undergraduate students with course offerings in information technology and management. The programs offered include a Bachelor of Information Technology & Management, Master of Information Technology & Management and a Computer and Network Security Technologies Graduate Certificate. The VoIP Lab is used in the information technology programs.

You rarely hear of academic education for VoIP and IP Telephony. Here is one source if you are in the Chicago area: the VoIP laboratory that is part of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Center for Professional development. The VoIP Lab is located at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Campus, which is a satellite (in Wheaton, Illinois) of Illinois Institute of Technology's Main Campus in Chicago. The Rice Campus caters to working professional graduate and upper-level undergraduate students with course offerings in information technology and management. The programs offered include a Bachelor of Information Technology & Management, Master of Information Technology & Management and a Computer and Network Security Technologies Graduate Certificate. The VoIP Lab is used in the information technology programs.The VoIP lab, setup by Carol Davids, is designed to be highly configurable and to support multiple projects simultaneously. There are over 30 test positions distributed across the lab. Students connect PCs or other specialized equipment to the test positions. The test positions are cabled to patch panels from which connections can be made to common equipment including hubs, switches and routers. The patch panels also provide access to the Internet via the IIT campus backbone network and to analog access links to the PSTN. Many VoIP/IPT vendors have donated hardware and software for use in the VoIP Lab.

This layout enables the student to create various network configurations and to study their effects on quality of service, security, routing and other aspects of VoIP service. It enables the creation of VPNs for industry lab partners to use when they need remote access to proprietary code and records. This layout also makes the lab an environment that can be shared by many students and projects simultaneously.

The original VoIP Lab was built as the class project of the VoIP Basics class (ITM546), in the spring of 2004. A key requirement of the design of both test beds was that activities in the lab should not impact IIT's production voice and data networks.

If VoIP security is important to you, you can access the first VoIP Roundtable that took place on September 10, 2007. Dr. Tom Messerges of Motorola Labs discussed various aspects of end-to-end VoIP security. The thrust of this presentation dealt with VoIP eavesdropping and present and anticipated solutions. The talk reviewed a number of solutions, including methods for establishing keys and securing the media data. Observations regarding advantages and disadvantages of these various solutions were outlined (SRTP, IPSec and the draft standard, Datagram TLS), and various use cases and scenarios were introduced. The very useful presentation slides for the September VoIP Roundtable "End-to-End Security Solutions for VoIP Communications" presentation slides are posted to the VoIP lab web site here. The second VoIP Roundtable discussion of the academic year is scheduled for Monday, February 11, 2008, from 6:30 to 9 PM. The presentation begins at 7:00 PM. The speaker is Dr. Vijay Gurbani of Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs Division, who will describe his current work developing a Security Event Management System (SEM). A SEM system can be viewed as the collection of tools, technologies and policies related to presenting a continuous security-specific view of the network. Its goal is to analyze information arriving as discrete events from various network services in order to determine whether the network, or a portion of the network, is in the process of being compromised and to undertake evasive action to mitigate the attack. Such systems can provide the security support necessary to successfully deploy VoIP applications and services. To learn more about the topic and the speaker, visit the VOIP Lab site here.

The next Round Table discussion will be on April 21. It will describe ways to ensure that a network is ready to successfully deliver VoIP applications and services.

The Illinois Institute of Technology's Third Annual VoIP Conference and Expo was held Thursday and Friday, October 25 and 26, 2007. The conference brought together professionals and executives from the telecommunications industry, its standards bodies and government agencies, as well as students and members of the business community. New partnerships and projects resulted from last year's conference.

If you are in the Chicago area and VoIP and its security implications are of interest, then check out the academic programs at IIT. You also might consider attending the annual conference and the roundtable discussions.