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The Impact of SDN on VoIP Implementations

April 28, 2022 / Blog / posted by Naishil Jha

As the world moves toward digitalization, automation, and innovative software, expectations are increasing for on-demand and customizable services for both enterprises and end consumers. When online, playing games, or on a video call, customers expect sub-millisecond latency and jitter, or consistency in quality of video and/or audio. Flawless services are similar to a puzzle with many pieces acting like deciding factors. All these factors, necessarily require a large scale of automation and orchestration and SDN (Software Defined Networking) is one of the missing pieces of this puzzle.

SDN is a major revolution in the data center, cloud, and enterprise network design. SDN can be viewed from a variety of angles, to elucidate let’s think of it as the separation of physical hardware from control software via an abstraction layer. The orchestration layer, also known as the management and control layer, is responsible for data flow routing across connections.

SDN represents a significant fundamental change in the way networks are designed and managed. Individual network devices in an SDN deployment are not configured separately, instead are added to the network and managed out of a centralized spot while network automation enables multiple parameters to be automatically altered according to specific variations in network behavior. SDN’s strong extensibility is appropriate for the unique requirements of voice services and video systems.

The Growing Demand for SDN

According to market reports, for the 2021-2030 forecast period the global SDN orchestration market is expected to hit US$ 117.24 billion, with a CAGR of 56% by 2030. At this point, this technology isn’t a huge secret — Tier 1 carriers are currently in progress with their SDN programs and have already made significant advances to reconfigure their networks. In some ways, these businesses have completed a lot of the work, offering successful SDN use cases and proving to the industry at large the benefits of a much more centralized and responsive network.

Software-defined networking has grown in popularity over the years, and appropriately so, due to the multiple advantages, it provides over traditional legacy infrastructure. SDN systems give network administrators and developers centralized control and operational efficiency, allowing them to respond fast and effectively. The SDN architecture consists of several tools and frameworks like the controller, switches forwarding, and backplanes, among others, which make systems more responsive and flexible.

Data traffic is predicted to increase in the upcoming years due to the increasing use of mobile devices, cloud computing, as well as the Internet of Things (IoT), resulting in high demand for smarter and stronger networks. The need for improved carrier network operability and bandwidth for service providers and large businesses is anticipated to drive the market for SDN solutions.

The SDN Impact on VoIP

VoIP and unified communications (UC) are two applications and services that greatly benefit from SDN. The following are the most significant benefits of SDN technology for VoIP implementations:

Quality of Service (QoS): The simple yet effective implementation of Quality-of-Service mechanisms is perhaps the most frequently mentioned advantage of SDN for VoIP. While installing a VoIP network, the QoS setting is important. QoS must be configured on all routers and switches that will transmit voice and video traffic. An SDN network is capable of the following:

Ensuring end-to-end QoS for all priority packets by enhancing QoS settings across all network devices.
Larger QoS requirements are interpreted and translated into suitable configurations that are automatically sent out to network devices and deployed instantly.
Enabling multiple configuration processes to be implemented on the entire network at the same time, reducing downtime and man-hours invested and increasing network efficiency.
Recognize specific defects or failures and then either notify administrators or proactively modify setups to fix the issues.

Besides these advantages, SDN is always network-aware and proactive. It means that a change on the network, whether caused by equipment breakdown, hacking intrusions, or normal variations in traffic patterns, can trigger the SDN intelligence to automatically alter QoS, maintaining the seamless workflow of voice and video traffic.

Signaling: VoIP leverages the SIP protocol for signaling and RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) for voice packet transmission. SDN applications can be configured to recognize the initial INVITE SIP message received from the calling device to another device. The application can obtain a copy of this SIP traffic and actively push flows to develop a pathway for the RTP stream.

Minimal Latency: SDN ensures that the network’s efficiency is improved to match fluctuations in the network demand. VoIP and video applications require minimum latency, specifically in networks that cover a country or multiple countries. Latency can be minimized to a bare minimum by optimizing network management.

Intelligent use of Bandwidth: As SDN applies intelligence to the entire network, the system has sufficient information to smartly reconfigure routing and switching parameters across the network, leading to more impactful bandwidth usage, while empowering more effective use of bandwidth-demanding apps like HD and 4K video-conferencing.

SDN Maturity and The Future

SDN is already a hot topic in carrier circles and it’s now making its way into presentations and other marketing materials from a slew of service providers, network solutions providers, and testing firms. For voice and video to function efficiently, certain network setups are required. Previously, this was thought to be exhausting, especially when dealing with extremely big and complicated networks. Addressing these concerns by making VoIP network solutions uncomplicated, broadly available, and facilitating deployment, has been possible thanks to software-defined networking.

Bankai Group is a global leader in retail and wholesale VoIP call termination, enabling businesses to provide next-gen services through effective technological solutions. Our one-stop wholesale VoIP platform gives carriers access to a variety of alternative network providers, allowing them to fulfill capacity demand while maintaining great quality and simplifying international calling.

The SDN is the basic building block for further advancements in telecom industry such as 6G technology, and self-driving autonomous networks. The new-age connective-technologies will heavily depend on the abilities of QoS to function easily. SDN will evolve each day to support the unavoidable exponentially increasing cross-layer optimization while protecting the rate of VoIP implementation affecting customers’ growth and development.

Naishil Jha

Naishil is a Sr. Content Writer at Bankai with rich exposure in the field of Creative Content, Marketing Communications and Branding. With an academic background in Mass Communication and Journalism he has pursued his career in Content Writing. He can be found, reading about Cricket, performing Street Photography and Cooking some delicious food in his leisure time.