Vision

The SNOCER project will be investigating approaches for overcoming temporal network, hardware and software failures and ensuring the high availability of the offered VoIP services based on low cost distributed concepts. That is instead of relying solely on expensive hardware and multiple network connections as is the case today in PSTN networks, SNOCER will be investigating the possibility of providing highly reliable services based on cooperation between independent providers in a manner ensuring the privacy and security of the customers and providers. In this context denial of service and intrusion detection tools will be developed that allow VoIP providers to monitor their infrastructure, detect irregularities and specify rules and actions that should be automatically executed for handling such cases. This will then be coupled with strategies to achieve high available VoIP infrastructures in a secure and low cost manner.

Project-Goals

In the context of SNOCER the main research work will be dedicated on the one hand to protecting the VoIP components of a VoIP provider from attacks and on the other to increasing the availability and reliability of those components. This will involve detecting and identifying attacks on a VoIP infrastructure and enabling the provider to specify rules and policies for dealing with those attacks. Further, to increase the reliability of the system, SNOCER will aim at providing mechanisms allowing the VoIP system to transfer the main functionalities of the VoIP service from one server to the other in a transparent manner. This work will be complemented with an investigation of the interaction between the reliability of the VoIP components and the underlying IP infrastructure.

Technology

SNOCER will achieve the following goals:

Solutions for highly available VoIP infrastructures: This part of the work will in the fist stage investigate points of failure of a VoIP infrastructure and provide solutions for achieving highly available components based on distributed architectures. The objectives of this part of the works are thereby:

• Identify and describe points of failure in a VoIP infrastructure
  
• Identify monitoring points and possible alarm utilities for indicating failures and initiating needs recovery mechanisms
  
• Provide solutions for supporting high available VoIP infrastructure at low costs