What is IvozProvider?

IvozProvider is a provider oriented multilevel IP telephony solution exposed to the public network.

IP Telephony

IvozProvider supports telephony systems that use Session Initiation Protocol, SIP, described in RFC 3261 and any related RFCs independent of manufacturers.

This allows total freedom to choose softphones, hardphones and the rest of elements that interact with IvozProvider, without any kind of binding with a manufacturer.

Right now, IvozProvider supports the following transport protocols for SIP:

  • UDP
  • TCP
  • TLS
  • Websockets

This last transport protocol described in RFC 7118 supports web integrated softphones, using the WebRTC standard allowing browsers to establish real-time peer-to-peer connections.

The supported audio codec list is:

  • PCMA (alaw)
  • PCMU (ulaw)
  • GSM
  • SpeeX
  • G.722
  • G.726
  • G.729 (manual installation required)
  • iLBC
  • OPUS

Multilevel

The web portal design of IvozProvider allows multiple actors within the same infrastructure:

../../_images/operator_levels.png

In Platform roles section, the different roles are deeply described, but to sum up:

  • God Admin: The administrator and maintainer of the solution. Provides access to multiple brand operators.
  • Brand Operator: Responsible of configuring carrier routing, billing and invoicing to multiple clients.
  • Client Operator: Responsible of its own configuration and to manage the final platform users.
  • Users: The last link of the chain, has SIP credentials and can access its own portal for custom configurations. This level is only available for vPBX client types.

Each one of this roles has its own portal that allows them to fulfill their tasks. Each portal can be customized in the following ways:

  • Themes and skins for corporate colours.
  • Client Logos.
  • Customized URLs with the Brand or Client domain.

Provider oriented

IvozProvider is a telephony solution designed with horizontal scaling in mind. This allows handling a great amount of traffic and users only by increasing the machines and resources of them.

This are the main ideas that makes this product provider oriented:

  • Despite the fact that all machine profiles can run in the same host, what makes it easier for the initial testing, each profile of IvozProvider can be separated from the rest to make it run in its own machine.

  • A distributed installation allows to distribute the correct amount of resources to each task, but also:

    • Geographic distribution of elements to warranty high availability in case of CPD failure.
    • Setup of key elements near the final users, to minimize the communication latencies.
    • Horizontal scaling of key profiles to handle hundred of thousands concurrent calls.

The resource consuming elements that limit the service of VoIP solutions use to be:

  • Already established calls audio management.
  • Managing configuration for each client administrator (IVRs, conference rooms, external call filters, etc.)
  • Databases of configuration and records.

IvozProvider was designed always keeping in mind the horizontal scaling of each of its elements, so it can handle thousands concurrent calls and what is more important, adapt the platform resources to the expected service quality:

  • Media-relay servers handle audio frames for the already established calls:

    • You can use as many media-relays as you need.
    • You can join media-relay in groups, and force some clients to use a group if you want.
    • You can setup media-relays near the final users, to minimize network latencies in the calls.

  • Application servers are in charge of processing the configured logic:

    • They scale horizontally: new Application Serves can be installed and added to the pool if you feel the need.
    • Every call is handled by the least busy Application Server
    • By default, there is no static assignment * between Clients and Application Servers. This way failure of any Application Server is not critical: the platform will ignore the faulty Application Server while distributing calls.

Exposed to the public network

As showed in the installation process, IvozProvider is designed to serve users directly from Internet. Although it can be used in local environments, IvozProvider is designed to use public IP addresses for its services, removing the need of VPN or IPSec tunnels that connect the infrastructure with the final users

Highlights:

  • Only the required services will be exposed to Internet.
  • The untrusted origins access can be filtered out by integrated firewall
  • Access from IP addresses or networks can be filtered to avoid any kind of phishing.
  • There is also an anti-flood mechanism to avoid short-life Denial of Service attacks.
  • Each client concurrent calls can be limited to a fixed amount.
  • IvozProvider supports connection from terminals behind NAT.
  • IvozProvider keep track of those NAT windows and keep them alive with nat-piercing mechanisms.
[*]The global administrator can assign Application Servers to some client types but this feature is more designed as a temporal debug and troubleshoot measure.