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An API for near Real Time Visualizations of Voice Services over Internet Protocol (VOIP)

This is a completed project.

Description

Industrial Problem

Ivrnet provides businesses with communication solutions, such as automated voice response services, outbound calling services, trunk call routing and call tracking. In order, to support these diverse set of voice solutions, Ivrnet has built a data center managing an intricate network of call routing hardware, such as Primary Rate Interfaces (PRIs), Cisco Routers, Interactive Voice Response(IVR) Applications, Database Servers, and fixed outgoing PSTN lines. Customer calls are initially routed through PRIs, which are then routed to Cisco Routers, and from there to an appropriate IVR application to serve the purpose of the call. In certain cases, calls need to be routed to outgoing PSTN lines. Ivrnet has a huge customer base and receives thousands of calls within an hour. As a result, it is difficult for the system administrators to determine which network elements are routing larger number of calls at certain times, while others are not being optimally utilized. Most importantly, the management needs to know about the routes that incur more cost than business value. Overall, Ivrnet requires near real time feedback on the status of their network as well as frequent routing paths for various services.

 

Research Goal

Visualizations are the most effective means of understanding data and identifying trends and outliers from the data. This projects research objective is to facilitate Ivrnet with near real time visualizations of the services they provide, in order to make effective decisions and improve quality of services. The approach will combine spatial and non-spatial visualization layouts in order to fulfill both the requirements of the management and the system administrators. The spatial visualizations are required to visualize the origin and destination of calls and facilitate the management and their customers with an overview on the most frequent call routing paths. Non-spatial visualizations are required to view network traffic throughout the day. These real time visualizations will provide system administrators with a constant report on the status of their network infrastructure. As a result, they can take an immediate action, if they are incurring a high number of dropped calls on a network element.

 

Images and Videos


This visualization is a non-spatial call routing information between network elements. The small dots represent the network elements and the colors white, grey, and dark grey represent the load on the network element.The lines between the network elements represent the calls being routed and the line thickness represents the number of calls.