Implementation and Analysis of Megaco/H.248 Protocol Using OPNET

[Description] Megaco/H.248 Protocol is a media gateway control protocol. Media gateway control protocols were established for the need of IP networks to interwork with traditional telephony systems and provide support for large-scale phone-to-phone deployments. Media gateway control protocols specify a master/slave architecture for decomposed gateways, in which Media Gateway Control (MGC) is the master server, and one or more Media Gateways (MGs) are the slave clients that behave like simple switches. One MGC can serve many MGs. While some other multimedia over IP protocols like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and H.323 are based on a peer-to-peer architecture.

Currently the best-known media gateway control protocols are Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) and Megaco/H.248. MGCP was published as informational RFC2705 and has been widely deployed. As an evolution of MGCP conceptually, Megaco/H.248 is expected to win wide industry acceptance as the official standard because it is a collaborative effort of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU), following an agreement by both bodies to cooperate on a single unified protocol.

In our project, we will implement an environment using OPNET to simulate Megaco/H.248. One MGC and two MGs will be in it. Also, we will implement some Megaco/H.248 commands on top of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) between MG and MGC that are required for basic call flows to demonstrate the functions of Megaco/H.248. The voice traffic between two MGs will be simulated using Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). Finally, we will give out some statistical analysis on various network performance parameters, such as call setup time and average delay per call experienced by media packets.

[References]