Library items tagged:

An Introduction to H.323 Videoconferencing, June 2002, D. E. Price and A.J. Spence Security Guide for H.323 Videoconferencing, Jan 2004, Tim Chown and Ben Juby

NAT should be familiar to network managers – it is widely deployed in large private networks. NAT is described fully in RFC1918 “Address Allocation for Private Internets”. NAT was introduced partly as a means of conserving real or public (also sometimes called 'routable') IP addresses. The deployment of NAT allows large organisations to give every computer a unique Internet address without diminishing the available pool of public IP addresses.

The H.323 protocol is the common name for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Recommendation that defines packet-based multimedia communications systems. The most commonly deployed packet-based networks are, of course, those based on the TCP/IP suite of communications, which inter-connect to form the Internet. The H.323 recommendation is a widely adopted umbrella protocol that defines standard behaviour for setting up and proceeding with audio and video calls.

This guide is aimed at network engineers and technicians, primarily in educational organisations, who need to provide a network capable of handling videoconferencing traffic. It aims to inform the reader about the ‘special’ requirements relating to real-time voice and video traffic, as opposed to http, ftp or other traffic types. It then discusses techniques that can be applied to provide a network that can be made to carry such traffic reliably without the need for continual network changes or upgrades.