A Brief Prehistory of Voice over IP parts 1 & 2

Google Tech Talk
August 10 & 11, 2010

ABSTRACT

Presented by Danny Cohen and Stephen Casner.

This talk explores the development of interactive packet voice beginning in 1974 with experiments over the ARPAnet in the NSC (Network Speech/Secure Communication) program sponsored by ARPA, initiated by Bob Kahn. One highlight will be the showing of a movie made in 1978 to demonstrate a multi-party teleconference over the packet network, including one participant interfaced from a telephone. The talk will be presented in two sessions (two days), with the movie shown at the start of the second session.

Part one covers concepts and lessons from this project:
* A 1971 realtime distributed flight simulation that sparked the idea
* Understanding real-time vs non-real-time communication
* Digital speech and the need to compress it (PCM, DPCM, CVSD, LPC/LPC10)
* Network Voice Protocol (NVP) over the ARPAnet, type0/type3 packets
* The birth of the Internet with TCP * Separating IP from TCP and adding UDP
* Building NVP-II on top of IP
* Adding packet video (DCT based compression)

Part two emphasizes the development of the voice protocols:
* Introducing and showing the teleconferencing movie from 1978
* Advances in equipment and function at the end of NSC in 1982
* Progress stalled, waiting to low-cost vocoding * Development of IP Multicast and the MBone
* Evolution from NVP to RTP, and RTP design philosophy
* Conferencing control protocols
* More recent history of VoIP

Speaker Info:

Danny Cohen, SunLab at Oracle
Danny led projects that pioneered realtime interactive applications over the ARPAnet and the Internet, such as visual flight simulation, packet-voice (aka Voice over IP) and packet-video.

After teaching at Harvard he joined USC/ISI where he started many network related projects, including Packet-Voice (aka Voice over IP), Packet-Video, Internet Concepts, MOSIS, Digital Library, e-commerce, and ATOMIC which was the forerunner of Myrinet.

Later, Danny co-founded Myricom (with Bob Felderman, Chuck Seitz, and others) which commercialized Myrinet, a high-performance system area network. In 2001 he joined Sun and was working there on very fast communication over very short distances, using optical and electrical signaling. He is perhaps best known for coining the terms "Big Endians" and "Little Endians".

Danny is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a fellow of the IEEE, and was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer until he was sold to Oracle. He was also a bona fide member of the International Flat Earth Society, and an instruments rated commercial pilot for single- and multi-engine planes, land and Sea.

Stephen Casner, Packet Design
Stephen L. Casner received his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 1976. At USC's Information Sciences Institute with Danny Cohen, he designed and implemented protocols and software for some of the earliest experiments with packet voice using the ARPAnet. Later, he was the primary organizer for the establishment of the worldwide Internet Multicast Backbone (MBONE) in its initial experimental phase. In 1995, he took this work to the commercial arena with further development of packet-based audio and video technology for both conferencing and streaming applications at Precept Software, which was acquired by Cisco Systems. He served as chairman of the Audio/Video Transport working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force from its inception in 1992 until 2003. This group has developed the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) for packet audio and video as well as other real-time multicast and unicast applications. Currently at Packet Design he is applying some of the same techniques in network performance measurement and routing analysis.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google tech talk
• arpanet
• VOIP
• Voice over IP
• darpa
• NVP
• RTP
• SIP
• packet audio
• packet video
• multimedia teleconferencing

[TheGeek001]

For a high tech company Google records too many of these Tech Talks in such a low tech/ low quality way that makes them nearly useless.

[F00dTube]

@TheGeek001 I agree, it is really sad and it's not even an old video. The first half is without a doubt very interesting but it's just incomprehensible most of the time. The second half (/talk) starts at 45:20

[TheBigbigKat]

I was looking forward to watching this but the delivery is so lame I fear it would just send me to sleep. I certainly couldnt sit through 1 hr 43 mins of it!

[jeff28kaizen1]

the professor talks like a retarded man..difficult to understand him

[lostbuffalo]

I'd like everyone to thumbs up my next statement to record it in imfamy.

Oracle recently sued Google over abusing Patent number: 5893120.

The patent is not lawful. It was issued in neglect of the law. Patents are a legal construct to protect the inventer of a thing, not to create usage monopoly.

You can patent the switches and devices. code is not a device it is a use of a device

Discovering a new use for an invention is not an invention.

Patent number: 5893120 does not create a new thing.

[RCbeastly]

It seems like the audio is just cutting out. It doesn't go faint as it would when stapping away from the mic, it simply cuts of fthen returns. I think there was just something wrong with the audio equipment.

[aviadra]

With all due respect to Danny, the first half of this video is simply unusable.

Too many times there is an interruption of the lecture flow because he stepped away from the microphone by a step or two, making it impossible to hear him.