Commetrex Corporation
Copyright© 2009
All Rights Reserved
Is the computer telephony industry passing up an opportunity to be much more efficient
-- able to deliver greater value to end users for far less investment? That means
lower costs to customers and greater return on investment for market participants.
Imagine for a moment where the computer industry would be today had there never
been the PC, and instead many Apples: Every computer manufacturer would have his own
proprietary closed-architecture bus and his own proprietary closed-architecture operating
system. Add-in board manufacturers would see markets one-tenth the size of today's
markets, as would application developers. And everything would cost more than with today's
open-architecture industry. This is not a pretty picture, but that is just the
situation in computer telephony today only it's worse.
In computer telephony, not only are system-level media-processing resources (the
"boards": voice, fax, speech recognition, etc.) closed architectures, they are
also function-specific. It's as if you had to buy one computer for spreadsheets and
another for word processing. (Remember the stand-alone word processor and how long
it lasted after the introduction of the PC?) The situation has begun to change with
companies such as BICOM, Brooktrout, Linkon, Natural MicroSystems (NMS), and PIKA,
beginning to take advantage of advances in DSP price-performance by developing
integrated-media (multi-function) computer telephony boards, usually by adding fax modems
supplied by another company. The Dialogic Antares and the Analogic TAP-800 series
are open-architecture DSP-resource boards designed to support speech recognition and
speech compression algorithms. And both Dialogic's recent announcement of its DM-3
architecture and Brooktrout's announcement of its Boston architecture are attempts to
allow them to move from their soon-to-be-obsolete fixed-function architectures to the new
integrated-media paradigm championed by Commetrex.
But, these DSP-resource boards have one of two limitations: either the board can't
support voice and call processing and you must use another board to supply those easily
implemented functions, or you must use the call management and voice processing supplied
with the board. The Dialogic Antares and Analogic TAP-800 series are examples of the
former, all others are examples of the latter. According to Jeff Hill, Antares
product manager, "The Antares can't be used in any configuration other than with
another voice board." The TAP-800 is the same. All the other boards
include the manufacturer's voice and call processing. Another vendor's voice processing
could not be added to an NMS board by a third party, for example. Since even the
boards which boast integrated media use closed, proprietary architectures the manufacturer
must do the media integration - a major challenge. Two of these companies, NMS and
PIKA, have boards that are at least partially open. But, since they are proprietary,
other companies cannot develop compatible versions and neither has sought to attract large
numbers of third-party developers of board-level applications (media-processing
technologies).
So why would the industry benefit from a standardized open-architecture media-neutral
CT resource architecture? Industry efficiency is why. Look at the PC industry.
It's the most efficient value-adding industry ever. Imagine a PC industry
with only proprietary PCs--just bunch of Apple Macintoshes. It would not be an
overstatement to say the world would be a different place and not for the better: There
would be less to choose from, and what was available would cost more. If open is
good enough for the PC industry it's good enough for the CT industry.
What the computer telephony industry needs is what the computer industry has had for
over a decade: a standardized environment that allows any company to develop the hardware
and board-level software environment. This will, in turn, allow any other company to
develop a higher-level of value addition, such as the software which creates basic
system-resource functionality (e. g., voice, fax, and data). These media-processing
resources would compete for board-level resources, such as DSP MIPS, memory, and PCM
streams, in order to provide media-specific services to client processes.
Commetrex and the other members of the MSP Consortium (BICOM, Calibre Industries,
Centigram, Cole Technical Services, Computer Communications Specialists, MiBridge, NKO,
Pika and QNX) have undertaken the task of defining the Media Stream Processor (MSP), a
system-resource-level software environment which gives the computer telephony developer
the option of developing either an environment (a PC add-in board or other resource
module) and its resource module-level software or media-processing products which are
MSP-compliant, and will therefore run on any MSP. M.100 (the MSP specification) hides the
specifics of the hardware: the media-stream interface, scalar and signal processors, and
the interface to other major system elements, such as the host computer.
So a developer could embed an M.100-compliant DSP-resource module in a
closed-architecture system, such as a PBX, and still use M.100-compliant media-processing
products to add the desired functions to the system, all without the cost or
time-to-market penalty of developing them in house or porting another company's
technology.
The current draft of the M.100 specification, is available from the MSP Consortium (http://www.msp.org). It specifies a comprehensive
stream-processing environment which not only meets the goal of dramatically reducing
porting costs, but reduces the initial development costs of integrated-media systems and
increases resource utilization.
The MSP's steam-based environment supports Anonymous Inter-Vendor cooperation by
allowing the output of one vendor's Media Stream Transform (MST) software element to feed
the input of another vendor's MST. For example, the output of Vendor A's vocoder
could feed Vendor B's TCP/IP stack.
The MSP improves resource utilization through reduced pre-emption. It's called
Stream-Paced Execution. Stream-Paced Execution means an MST is activated when prior
MSTs have completed, and executes until it has processed a pre-defined (through its
execution wrapper) increment of stream (usually isochronous) data. This means each MST
executes for an optimum period of time: For a modem it might be an integral number of
bauds; for a speech-recognition algorithm it might be one utterance. Because an MST
relinquishes control when it has completed a "work package" rather than loses it
through pre-emption, context switch time is significantly reduced.
M.100 does not define the host-system bus, the resource module's or board's form
factor, media-stream highway, or on-board processors. But it does define the
interfaces to these system elements visible to board-level applications. Actually,
use of the term "board" should be avoided since the MSP specification is just as
applicable to a host-based implementation(that uses MMX instructions as a DSP(as it is to
a board-level implementation.
The definition of such a platform can have significant consequences: Any company can
design and manufacture MSP-compliant hardware or software. The price of hardware
will go down. The price of media-processing software will go down. Density and
media-diversity will increase. Performance of media-processing technology will
increase.
If you are interested in such a development, the MSP Consortium is interested in
working with you on refining the specification and promoting the acceptance of the MSP
standard. We want the MSP to meet your needs. By working together we can make
sure M.100 is open for all and meets the needs of the largest possible set of industry
developers at all levels of the value-adding spectrum.
Your investment would be the time to review and comment on the MSP requirements
document. You will also be asked to make your participation in the MSP Consortium
public.
If you're interested call Mike Coffee, the designated "MSP Evangelist", at
Commetrex at 770-449-7775x310 or mcoffee@commetrex.com>
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