An open-source hardware approach for high performance low-cost QoS monitoring of VoIP traffic

A key issue in VoIP services market is the availability of tools that permit a constant monitoring of the relevant Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Several commercial and open-source solutions are available, based on dedicated hardware and/or open-source software. These solutions aim to achieve a tradeoff between performance and instrumentation cost. In general, high performance and precise monitoring tools are based on dedicated hardware, which is expensive. In contrast, cheaper software-based solutions working on top of a Commercially available Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware are performance-limited, especially when serving high-capacity links. In this context, the paper presents an open-source solution for QoS monitoring of VoIP traffic that achieves high performance at significantly lower costs. The proposed solution exploits the performance capabilities achievable with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The associated costs reduction arises from the high flexibility of an FPGA. Our experimental analysis explores the accuracy of the developed prototype, measuring against relevant QoS parameters of VoIP traffic on high capacity links.