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The Luxvoice Softswitch, Wholesale - Retail, Billing Solution
Open source - you are in control, you can expand, you can modify
Compete with biggest - exploit low-cost routes, deliver top notch quality
Luxvoice is an open source carrier-grade softswitch, routing and billing solution for VoIP, Video and Messaging. The main software components are licensed under the GPL license. Luxvoice is used in production and is stable. Luxvoice is based on: Yate, CDRTool, Freeradius and the Luxvoice Routing Logic.
Luxvoice is an extremely cost-effective solution which delivers high voice quality even in difficult markets (e.g. to destinations with unreliable infrastructure) while maximizing profitability.
Thanks to the sophisticated routing engine, the service provider enjoys immediate improvements in call quality and profitability. This is achieved by monitoring continuously call quality and adjusting the routing in an automated process. Routing decisions are taken according to the quality metrics, client call costs, call termination costs, currency rates and other parameters.
Luxvoice installations can serve thousands of media streams / calls on a clustered solution.
99.999% carrier-grade service availability is achieved by redundant hardware and software, real-time replication and near-real-time failover capabilities.
Overview
Cost effective open source software
Luxvoice is built on open source software components which have been used in production for several years. Using GPL software components enables providers to spend their budget on customization.
Luxvoice is designed to run on low-cost industry standard computers. Carrier-grade reliability is achieved with duplicated hardware and automatic failover mechanisms.
Server visualization allows to utilize the hardware fully. One server may host one or several virtual machines, and may also serve as a backup server for another server.
Profitability, Call Quality, Return on investment
Taking calls from customers and sending them out to wholesale carriers or termination partners with static rules or least-cost-routing is not enough to be profitable and satisfy customers.
Improve quality and profits
- Maximize average call duration (ACD) on each call
- Maximize the number of successful calls (ASR) with intelligent routing and failover
- Enjoy windfall profits from currency rate differences
- Ensure that no call is unprofitable
- Offer low tariffs to cost-sensitive customers and higher tariffs to retail clients, serve them with different qualities
The Routing Logic guarantees call quality and profitability across all route combinations.
Quality metrics (ACD, ASR, PDD) for each route are continuously updated after each call. Incoming-outgoing call rates, currency rates, quality metrics and client parameters can be taken as input parameters for the routing logic.
The routing logic allows the service provider to offer client tariffs with different quality and price levels. The engine guarantees that premium routes also receive premium quality and that low-rate routes are served profitably.
The routing engine requires a minimum of manual input and intervention so that vast routing tables with elaborate routing logic can be maintained and human errors are avoided.
Providers can enjoy substantial improvements in profits due to the Luxvoice routing engine. Price differences between wholesale and premium routes are regulary around 30%. Also currency fluctations between the local currency, USD and EUR can be substantial. The routing engine allows to identify high-quality, low-cost routes and also exploit differences in currency rates. Overall these abilities improve profits substantially.
Luxvoice enables the provider to compete with his fiercest competitors.
Carrier Grade, Redundancy, Fail-over
Carrier grade is achieved by:
- Reliable software components which have been used for years in production with many users
- Hardware redundancy, allowing to hot swap hardware
- Server visualization for continuous replication of entire virtual servers and possibility to upgrade or move servers "on the fly"
- Monitoring mechanisms
- Near-real-time failover
- Real-time replication of all data, programs and configurations
Protocols SIP, H323, IAX, MGCP, ISDN, SS7 ...
- H.323
- SIP
- IAX
- MGCP
- ISDN
- SS7
- Protocol conversion
Most notably the Yate engine supports SIP and H323 protocol conversion. Calls can be converted from any protocol to any protocol.
Hardware, Capacity, Clustering
In the smallest configuration Luxvoice can be deployed on a single server. It is recommended to use minimum two servers to achieve redundancy and avoid that database hard disk access disturbs voice streams.
The capacity can be increased by using further softswitches which are connected to the central database.
Call Rating
Call data records (CDR) are written by Yate into Radius records for incoming and outgoing call legs.
The CDRTool rating engine continuously processes Radius records and writes the call charges and rating information back into the Radius records.
Radius records can be manually re-rated. The rating engine handles complex rating tables for different client groups. Available parameters: day-night zones, weekend zones, minimum duration rated, initial minimum duration rated, connection fee.
Billing
Rated Radius records are stored in a MySQL database. Radius records can be utilised by any third-party billing package.
Luxvoice comes with Openoffice report scripts which condense Radius MySQL database data into billing statements.
Media Streams Voice, Video, Chat, Codecs
The softswitch can proxy RTP media streams or route media streams directly between endpoints. In media proxy mode the softswitch can detect inactive RTP media streams and close calls. Thereby costly "run-away calls" are avoided.
The softswitch supports a variety of codecs:
- mulaw, G711 mu-law
- alaw, G711 a-law
- gsm, European GSM 06.10
- lpc10, Linear Prediction Codec
- ilbc, Internet Low Bandwidth Codec
- amr, Adaptive Multi-Rate 3GPP
- slin, Signed Linear 16-bit uncompressed
- g728, ITU G.728 all variations
Luxvoice proxies the following codes, codec conversion however requires an extra license as these codecs are patented:
- g723, ITU G.723 all variations
- g726, ITU G.726 32-bit
- g729, ITU G.729 all variations
Business cases
- Wholesale Softswitch, "cherry-picking" quality routes and least-cost-routing
- Retail platform to service corporate customers
- Back-end for corporate PBX to route calls to providers with different protocols (SIP/H323/ISDN) and minimize call costs
- Back-end for existing retail or calling card platform to ensure high quality and minimize termination costs
- CDR generation and call rating platform
- Protocol conversion between H323 and SIP
- Call cost control, ensuring that call revenues are always higher than call costs
Service Providers and Wholesale Luxvoice is the ideal core softswitch platform for the emerging / alternative service provider and also wholesale companies. The variety of protocols SIP, H323, ISDN etc. ensure that the service provider can interconnect to most carriers and also clients.
Most importantly, the sophisticated routing engine gives the service provider an edge over the competition so that he can minimize his costs and also offer to clients competitive rates at constant quality.
The ability to route intelligently makes the difference between being profitable or not.
Add-on for existing platforms - Calling card providers There are a number of business cases where Luxvoice provides immediate benefits, even if already a platform exists.
E.g. Many calling-card, retail voice platforms lack capabilities to monitor quality and adjust the routing automatically. To ensure high quality such users therefore usually route calls to premium providers at high costs.
Luxvoice allows to use low-cost and also premium routes simultaneously while ensuring consistent quality as the routing engine can cherry-pick the good routes. This provides immediate benefits in cost reduction and improved quality.
Corporates Corporate users are using an increasing number of service providers to terminate calls. Maintaining the routing in a corporate PBX can be a very cumbersome task. Luxvoice simplifies this greatly by automating the routing according to quality or price criteria. All calls from the PBX are sent to Luxvoice which then sends the calls out to the different service providers via SIP, H323 or ISDN.
Software components
- Industry standard Intel 386/686 hardware
- Debian Linux
- Yate. Yate is a telephony engine which supports a variety of communication protocols, among others: SIP, H323, ISDN. The Yate software architecture is highly reliable, predictable, efficient and adaptable as it is based on an internal messaging engine which represents the different call states (ringing, answering etc.) as messages with parameters. These internal messages can be manipulated by YATE or external software modules.
- CDRTool. CDRTool is a fast PHP-based call rating engine and is maintained by AG-Projects. CDRTool is used in production by several large OpenSER based telecom projects to calculate call charges and monitor client balances. CDRTool rating daemon processes Radius call data records according to internal rating table rules. Luxvoice utilizes the CDRTool rating tables in two further ways:
- Quality monitoring of routes
- Routing of inbound and outbound calls
- Freeradius. Freeradius receives Radius records from YATE and writes them into a MySQL database.
- MySQL. The MySQL databases hold Radius records, rating tables and SIP/H323 provisioning parameters, e.g. gateway information, codecs supported.
- OpenVZ. OpenVZ is a highly-efficient software visualization solution maintained by Parallels, allowing to run several virtual machines on one computer. Virtual OpenVZ machines may run on performance levels which are very close to running on real hardware as the visualization overhead is very small. Luxvoice uses OpenVZ to achieve two objectives:
- Real-time replication of entire virtual machines which run Luxvoice service. In case of a hardware failure the entire virtual machine can be started on backup hardware with no data loss and no loss of configuration.
- Testing of new software configurations on the same hardware as the production system. Once test system with a new configuration is stable, the virtualized production server is unmounted and the test system becomes the new production server.
- DRBD. DRBD is a software disk driver which replicates entire disk partitions between computers over a dedicated Ethernet link in real-time. Luxvoice uses DRBD to replicate the entire virtual machines running Luxvoice services to backup machines. Thereby all data and all software configurations are always completely replicated in real-time.
- Heartbeat. Heartbeat monitors hardware nodes. In case of a failure of a node Heartbeat starts Luxvoice virtual machines on a backup node.
Background
Luxvoice is built on years of experience running open source systems, Openser, Yate and Asterisk.
The main motivation to build Luxvoice was to achieve higher call qualities while simultaneously improving carrier profitability.
These two goals can only be achieved if the carrier can match incoming calls from his different client groups exactly to his outgoing routes according to certain price and quality criteria. E.g. customers paying higher tariffs and who expect a high quality can be routed to premium quality routes. Clients which only pay very low call rates can be routed to low cost routes.
Such routing policies can be only achieved by fully automated routing. Taking bad routes out and assigning routes to clients manually is almost impossible. Typically outgoing calls are routed via several wholesale carriers who in turn are connected to several carriers. Wholesale carriers send very large rating tables with thousands of codes. All of those routes may have very different qualities. Therefore it is necessary to "cherry-pick" the good routes.
Further points which must be addressed:
- Quality on routes can change quickly
- Routes may be congested
- Different client groups expect different quality
- Profitability must be ensured across all incoming/outgoing call-leg combinations
Luxvoice solves the problem in several ways:
- Quality monitoring on every route
- Dynamic routing according to price and quality criteria
- Full information from the incoming call leg is available on the outgoing call leg
- Real-time failover to redundant routes in the order determined by dynamic routing rules
The constant quality monitoring and the dynamic routing form an implicit feedback-loop which constantly optimizes the routing. The routing is optimized according to the routing algorithms which maximize certain criteria for example some quality index function QI= ASR * ACD or any other propriety rule.
To achieve the above Luxvoice was based on the Yate telephony software engine. The main Yate strength is its unique design which allows to build very efficient applications. Yate´s core is a messaging engine where every call state and function is represented as a message. Messages are issued, processed and manipulated by Yate modules and external modules. This concept allows to build very elegant, compact applications which are very predictable and therefore reliable.
Luxvoice is running in production and has achieved its aims fully. From our point of view the most important achievement were that profitability was increased while quality also improved. Manual controlling and re-routing tasks have been reduced to a minimum.
Software Licensing
Luxvoice softswitch license follows the business model of many other open source projects. The basic software is free. Customization is not free and propriety, but open source.
The main Luxvoice software components are licensed under the GPL open source license. These software components are customized by configuration scripts, patches and stored database procedures. These customizations are also open-source but delivered under a propriety license exclusively for the client.
The licensing policy gives clients maximum security for their investment as they can modify and upgrade the software.
Support - Pricing
Luxvoice is priced at a fraction of comparable closed source solutions. The price is kept so low that it is does not make sense to develop such solution by onself.
1. Luxvoice Basic - 2 OpenVZ Virtual machines
- Virtual Machine 1: Luxvoice Softswitch
- Virtual Machine 2: Luxvoice Database and Web tools
Delivery: Remote installation on clients OpenVZ virtual machines.
Installation and license costs on request
2. Luxvoice Carrier-grade - OpenVZ hosts + 2 virtual machines
- Software for 2 Debian OpenVZ hardware nodes configured to host one or many virtual machines and to provide near-realtime failover in case of hardware failure.
- Virtual Machine 1: Luxvoice Softswitch
- Virtual Machine 2: Luxvoice Database and Web tools
Delivery: Remote installation on 2 Debian Etch servers
Installation and license costs on request
Pricing for customizations on request.
Support: 20% of Installation and License costs per year.
For support, pricing and licensing questions please contact info at luxvoice.org
