Communication in change - Voice over IP in safety and security critical communication networks

Abstract

During the last decade communication technology has changed rapidly. Due to its decreasing costs and rising expansion, IP (Internet Protocol) technology has found its way to areas that have long been the domain of public-switched telephone networks (PSTN). Voice over IP (VoIP) applications are widely used not only for phone calls or common Internet conferences, but also tend to be used for safety critical communication applications. Hence security and safety topics arise, which pose new challenges in this area of research. The authors are convinced that new issues on the network layer as well as on the application layer require detailed analysis. Hence this paper gives an overview on latest developments in this area, and states the authors' view on this topic. Thereby safety and security issues are faced from different abstraction layers. On the one hand the network layer and on the other hand the application layer focusing on middleware systems in the area of service oriented architectures (SOAs). © 2009 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.