Mobicents Media Server passes 100% JSR 309 Compliance

The Mobicents Media Server continues the tradition of the Mobicents community to drive simultaneously Open Source innovation and Standardization to an otherwise siloed telco industry. As of today, November 6, 2011, the Mobicents Media Server is the first Open Source (LGPL) 100% JSR 309 compliant implementation.

JSR 309 is the standard Java API that allows control of media server resources. It makes it possible for Java developers to implement in a standard and portable way, rich media applications such as Conference Calling, Interactive Voice Response, DTMF detection, Text To Speech, Video Playback and many others.

Established media server vendors such as HP OpenCall, Dialogic, Voxeo, and Radisys already offer JSR 309 drivers for their products. And now MMS joins the group as the first Open Source implementation.

We welcome all interested community users to verify our claim and bring up any potential issues. Build and run instructions are located at:
https://code.google.com/p/mediaserver/wiki/InstallationNotes

Please report your test results on the mobicents public mailing list or the Media Server issue tracker.

The path to JSR 309 certification has been a long and hard battle. It started over three years ago when we decided to join the JSR 309 Expert Group. Participating in the discussions has been a great experience. We learned a lot from the other members of the EG, most of which had deeper experience with media delivery at the time. The HP OpenCall team, who lead the spec did a great job advancing the collaboration past religious deadlocks towards results. As far as I remember the 309 EG met its deadlines pretty closely. Impressive for a big group of contributors to a communications standard. Anyone who ever sat on an ITU, OMA or GSMA standards committee would understand why I make this remark.

Starting with a strong specification and TCK, we were able to advance with the implementation, even though it required significant refactoring because the 309 model was fundamentally different than the original MMS architecture. By December 2009 we have reached the 70% pass mark. It took almost another two years to solve the last 30% riddle. But we finally solved it!

Many, many thanks to the project lead Oleg Kulikoff, who did not give up the fight to design a quasi-real-time media server engine, that delivers predictable, measurable media processing operations in pure Java, without relying on hardware guaranteed preemptive scheduling properties.

I strongly recommend following Oleg's blog if you are interested in this non-trivial problem. There are important implications that will play a big role in our cloud strategy, where we have to deal with virtualized environment, several layers above and across commodity hardware.

Many thanks to the other key contributors: Vladimir Ralev, Yulian Oifa, Amit Bhayani, and Bartosz Baranowski who supported Oleg throughout various stages of his journey. Special acknowledgement goes to Yulian who helped us cross the finish line in the last few weeks after Oleg had reached the 90% TCK mark.

I know there are other contributors to MMS that I missed to acknowledge. Please correct me in the comments to this post.

I am very excited about this achievement and look forward to community feedback.

Important as it may be, JSR 309 is just one of the milestones on the MMS roadmap. Stay tuned for other great announcements in the near future, especially ones related to auto-scaling MMS in the cloud. Better yet, take an active role in the project and help us get there faster! Everyone wins.

Annual Mobicents Community Summit - Sochi, Russia, December 4-9, 2011

By tradition, the Mobicents core team and community contributors will meet in person for a week of brainstorming and fun. The location we chose this year is Sochi, Russia - the home of the Winter Olympic Games 2014.

The goal of the week-long gathering is to socialize, catch up on the latest in the Cloud Communications industry, review Mobicents projects progress and set direction for the next 12-18 months.

The event is open to all Mobicents contributors and community members. This is a great opportunity to mingle with the core team and share experience with fellow developers, product managers and entrepreneurs.


The event will be hosted at the picturesque Katerina Hotel:
http://www.katerinahotels.com/en/sochi/alpik/main/

If you would like to join us, please contact me (ivelin117 at gmail) or any other core team member as soon as possible.

Discounted hotel rooms are limited. Lead time may be required for obtaining a Russian tourist visa, depending on your country of origin. Do not delay. Contact us today!

The work days for the meeting are December 5,6 and 7.

December 4 is arrival day. The closest airport to Sochi is Adler/Sochi (AER).
December 8 is allocated for team building activities and focused group meetings.
December 9 is departure day.

We will allocate all of December 5 for community member presentations. This is a great opportunity for presenters to solicit feedback from fellow experts and influence the project roadmap discussions in the following two days. Let me know if you have something interesting to share in a 20 minute short talk. Example topics:
- Cool Customer Success Story
- Innovative App
- Surviving Production Crisis
- Developing Hurdles
- 3rd Party Product Integration Concerns
- Recommendations for Improvement
- Features Wish List

December 6 and 7 are allocated for core member presentations on:
- Project Development Progress for the past year
- Community Development Progress for the past year
- Planning vs Reality: Matching the 12 month roadmap set a year ago to what actually happened
- Integration Concerns with Other Mobicents Projects
- Integration Concerns with 3rd Party Products
- Cross Project Concerns: Cloud Deployment, Clustering, Management, Auto Scaling
- Setting the Roadmap for the next 12-18 month


Detailed Tentative Agenda:

December 5: Stories from the battle field

• 8am-9:20am: Breakfast, Meet and Greet
• 9:30am-10:20am: Welcome Message, Round Table Introductions
• 10:30am-10:50: Transitioning Mobicents leadership from Red Hat to new company - Ivelin Ivanov
• 11am-11:20am: Twilio Client and Cloud Communications - Jonas Borjesson, Twilio
• 11:30am-11:50am: Open - Battlefield Story
• noon-1pm: lunch
• 1:30pm-1:50pm: Multi Modal Video Conferencing -  Nick Semergey and Alex Vinogradov, Avistar - Codeminders
• 2:00pm-2:20pm: Open - Battlefield Story
• 2:30pm-2:50pm: Moho - FOSS Telco Framework for Java Developers - Jason Goecke, Voxeo Labs
• 3:00pm-3:20pm: Mobicents Diameter in MEVEO Open Source Billing - Sébastien Michéa, Manaty
• 3:30pm-3:50pm: Innovation with Mobicents at MTN - Amit Bhayani
• 4:00pm-4:20pm: Open - Battlefield Story
• 4:30pm-4:50pm: Unified Cloud Communications for SMBs - Silvano Girardi Jr, Inphonex
• 5:00pm-5:20pm: Open - Battlefield Story
• 5:30pm-5:50pm: Cool apps for Next Gen Intelligent Networks - Vilius Panevėžys, Elitnet
• 6:00pm-6:20pm: break
• 6:30pm: dinner

December 6: Mobicents Projects: Progress and Roadmap
*  10am-10:50: RestComm - Thomas Quintana
*  11am-11:20: OpenVBX on RestComm - Thomas Q
*  11:30am-11:50: Cloud Management - Thomas Q
*  noon-1pm: lunch
*  1:30pm-2:50pm: From SIP Servlets to TelScale - Jean Deruelle
*  3pm-3:50pm: SIP Load Balancing - Vladimir Ralev
*  4pm-4:50pm: Converged LB, TLS, SBC, NAT - Vladimir Ralev
*  5pm-5:50pm: Container independent failover framework - Jean Deruelle
*  6pm-6:20pm: CDI Telco Framework and Aquilian - George Vagenas


December 7: Mobicents Projects: Progress and Roadmap (cont.)
*  10am-10:50: TelScale SNMP and JMX management - Jean Deruelle
*  11am-11:50: QE achievements, infrastructure review, frameworks, roadmap, expansion to community contributed resources - Luis Barreiro
noon-1pm: lunch
*  1:30pm-2:50pm: Media Server theory, practice, cloud considerations, design discussion, roadmap
*  3pm-3:50pm: JSLEE progress and roadmap - Eduardo Martins
*  4pm-4:50pm: Diameter progress, popular use cases, roadmap - Alexandre Mendonca, Bartosz Baranowski
*  5pm-5:50pm: SS7 progress, popular use cases, roadmap - Amit Bhayani, Sergey, Bartosz

All meetings will take place in room "Tor".

Link to the Google Calendar Public Event:
http://goo.gl/nrMz4


Looking forward to a great week in Sochi - the Winter Olympics City of 2014.

Ivelin Ivanov
Founder, Mobicents

HA strategies for Mobicents

Continuing on the topic of deploying mobicents in a cloud environment (whether private or public), Vladimir Ralev published a document that attempts to find the fundamental types of SIP and HTTP interactions that can be used in composition to describe a broad range of real world use cases.

The main value of this work is that it greatly simplifies an otherwise complex task of correctly designing and implementing High Availability, Load Balancing, Fault Tolerance and Elasticity. The paper allows us to wrap our minds around a small number of use cases and focus our energy on optimizing Mobicents in a cloud environment for these.

Community feedback is welcome as always. Looking forward to reading your comments.


Direct link to the document: here.

Mobicents SIP and HTTP Load Balancing

The topic of High Availability and Fault Tolerance is always interesting as the set of use cases evolves and the infrastructure available to support various solutions varies. Vladimir Ralev, Mobicents architect, discusses some essential aspects of SIP Load Balancing and converged SIP + HTTP load balancing in a pretty thorough presentation (42 slides):



Comments to this exciting topic are most welcome.

Mobicents Cloud Communications

For the last 6 months there has been a great amount of activity in the Mobicents community on the topic of Cloud Communications.

To provide an overview of our current state and future roadmap to community members interested in the topic, we created a short (under 4 minutes) video.

For a more technical discussion of Mobicents for Cloud Communications, take a look at the research thesis by Thibault Leruitte at Universit e catholique de Louvain: Migration of Mobicents SIP Servlets on a Cloud Platform.

As always, looking forward to feedback, criticism, suggestions and most of all code contributions :)

Rancore Technologies wins Red Hat Innovation Award

Congratulations to Aayush Bhatnagar and his team at Rancore Technologies for winning the 2011 Red Hat Innovation Award for Outstanding Open Source Architecture! This is a well deserved acknowledgment for a cutting edge telecom platform for 4G/LTE networks and applications. I am happy to have Aayush on the Mobicents core team. His input is essential to the project's roadmap, priorities and architecture.

A few excerpts from the award web page:

"Headquartered in Navi Mumbai, India, Rancore Technologies a leading technology R&D firm focused on 4G telecom networks and services. Rancore is a privately held company and a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a fortune 500 firm and India's most valuable company."

"Telecom features and services were implemented on top of the Mobicents Stack (JAIN SLEE) which was in-turn deployed on JBoss Application server. Mobicents provided a rich suite of resource adaptors which acted as Telco protocol connectors. JAIN SLEE RAs such as HTTP, XCAP, SIP, SMPP and DIAMETER were extensively used in the products. Rancore also contributed code, patches, bug fixes and knowledge to the Mobicents community and hence acquired a seat in the Mobicents core team."

"This project is going to be part of one of one of the largest 4G LTE/IMS deployments in the world - and in the world's biggest telecom market – India. Rancore's SDP is designed to be suitable for mission critical 4G deployments, where high throughput and low latency are desired. By showing quite clearly that a low-cost, high-throughput, mission- critical fault tolerant system can be built with the right use of open source technology, Rancore is the first company in India to utilize open source technology to build a Service Delivery Platform based on 4G standards. Lastly, Rancore has also contributed code, patches, bug fixes and knowledge to the Mobicents community - a strong testament to its belief in open source philosophy."

Congratulations, Aayush! Looking forward to hearing more about the market success of Rancore Technologies.

LGPL 2.1 license for all Mobicents projects: effective March 1, 2011

The Mobicents team has decided to align its licensing policy with the rest of the JBoss projects and convert all of its source code files to LGPL 2.1 Open Source license.

The decision is effective immediately!

I would like to thank everyone who has shared their thoughts on this subject over time. Congratulations to all LGPL advocates who have made their arguments clear. Victory well deserved! :)

Do you have a cool Mobicents based application? Let's show it to the world!

JBoss World 2011 is around the corner. It will be the biggest JBoss event ever. If you have a great telco app based on Mobicents, let me know. We will work together to propose it for the show floor at JudCon - the Alpha Geek event preceding JBoss World. All proposals have to be compiled by the end of February 2011. Let's not waste time. Let the best and bravest stand out!
http://www.jboss.org/events/JUDCon