Experiences of VoIP Traffic Monitoring in a Commercial ISP

VoIP (Voice over IP)has widely been addressed as the technology that will change the Telecommunication model opening the path for convergence. Yet, this revolution is far from being complete, since, as of today the majority of telephone calls are still originated by circuit-oriented networks. In this paper, the authors present their experience in the real-time monitoring of VoIP calls from an commercial operational network. They discuss and present a methodology and a large dataset of measurements, collected from the FastWeb backbone, which is one of the first worldwide Telecom operators to offer VoIP and high-speed data access to the end-user. Traffic characterization focuses on several layers, concentrating on both end-user and ISP perspectives.