Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.8

By : Anthony Minessale II, Giovanni Maruzzelli
Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.8

By: Anthony Minessale II, Giovanni Maruzzelli

Overview of this book

FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat-driven products, scaling from a soft-phone to a PBX and even up to an enterprise-class soft-switch. This book introduces FreeSWITCH to IT professionals who want to build their own telephony system. This book starts with a brief introduction to the latest version of FreeSWITCH. We then move on to the fundamentals and the new features added in version 1.6, showing you how to set up a basic system so you can make and receive phone calls, make calls between extensions, and utilize basic PBX functionality. Once you have a basic system in place, we’ll show you how to add more and more functionalities to it. You’ll learn to deploy the features on the system using unique techniques and tips to make it work better. Also, there are changes in the security-related components, which will affect the content in the book, so we will make that intact with the latest version. There are new support libraries introduced, such as SQLite, OpenSS, and more, which will make FreeSWITCH more efficient and add more functions to it. We’ll cover these in the new edition to make it more appealing for you.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Conferencing Concepts


Conferencing, participating in a call where more than two parties can communicate, has always been one of the most sought-of service in telecommunication.

Technology for allowing more than two parties to concurrently talk each other (eg, not in a push-to-talk service) is very much different than the one used for "normal" calls with two participants. In a "normal" call, you only care that media streams goes back and forth from caller to callee. Actually you can have (and often you have) the media streams (via RTP) going directly from caller to callee and back, bypassing FreeSWITCH or any other telecommunication server.

Conferencing, on the other hand, needs a server. The most basic function of a conferencing server is mixing, eg merging, the different media streams that are sent by participants. The resulting merged stream is broadcasted to all participants. So, each participant sends to server its own media stream, and all participants receive from server a media stream...