The students of Illinois Institute of Technology recently held their Real-Time Communications (RTC) Lab. This is a venue in which industry and academia connect and collaborate for teaching, research and development activities that further the advancement of networked communications. The program encourages projects from partners in industry and academia.
“The students gave very fine presentations which were very well received by an extremely interactive audience. Their projects were all focused on challenges to real-time communications today, and audience members, from industry and the technical community, made suggestions and shared their own experiences with the students throughout the presentations and discussion period,” said Carol Davids, Industry Professor and Director, Real-Time Communications Lab, Illinois Institute of Technology, School of Applied Technology.
This past semester brought interesting new concepts from the bright minds of the students enrolled in the program. They all evolved around efficiency and how to better our world.
“This was an excellent opportunity for the students to discuss the real-world application of the concepts that they worked on during the semester. Audience members also offered support and ideas for the future evolution of these and other RTC Lab projects at Illinois Institute of Technology,” said Davids.
The first presentation focused on improving the support for emergency call responders with a service that supplies indoor location to emergency calls. The motivation behind this project was a recent FCC rulemaking that requires cellular service providers to identify the indoor location of mobile 9-1-1 calls originating indoors. The service covers the entire main campus of the institute and the location discovery algorithm has been refined.
After describing and demonstrating the current service, the team reported on methods they are using to improve the location accuracy of an emergency call. They discussed two changes in methodology. The first one moves more of the computation to the Android phone app. The other change is how the app uses Bluetooth sensors instead of Wi-Fi access points to provide the location information.
Another presentation was on the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Public Service Answering Point (PSAP), which is the first point of contact for the caller in distress. Currently, people text 911 from their smart phones, they attempt video calls and other common means of communications. Most PSAPs can’t handle these modes of communication yet. A new design for the PSAP, using the WebRTC protocols and architectures were described and its early implementation was demonstrated. The solution helps the code for the PSAP since it is embedded in a web page and no special systems or applications need to be installed at the call center where the operators take calls.
The final presentation was how the students installed and configured an IMS test bed using the open software application, OpenIMS Core. They tested the performance of the IMS Network to determine the maximum rate at which the system can complete calls with no errors. They reported their results, compare these to the performance of a non-IMS SIP network and explained the key role that an IMS Core network plays in the next generation of cellular networks, VoLTE or Voice over LTE, in which calls are no longer carried using circuit switched methods in TDM timeslots, but instead are carried over IP networks.
Edited by
Ken Briodagh