Real-Time Communications (RTC) - Student Presentations

Illinois Institute of Technology students recently presented and demonstrated their Real-Time Communications projects on Wednesday, December 2, 2015. Below are pictures and an overview of the student projects.

Presentations included:

Indoor Location for NG911 – New Directions
A service that supplies indoor location to emergency call responders will be demonstrated and described. The impetus for 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 has evolved since we last demonstrated it in April, 2015. It now covers the entire Main Campus and the location discovery algorithm has been refined. Students will describe and demonstrate the current service.

Indoor Location for NG911 Using Bluetooth LE
After describing and demonstrating the current service, the team will report on methods they are using to improve the location accuracy. Two changes in methodology are being explored: One moves more of the computation to the Android phone app; the other uses BlueTooth sensors instead of WiFi Access Points to provide the location information. The team will describe these testing and development initiatives and welcome your comments and support.

WebRTC-based PSAP for Emergency Communications
The Public Service Answering Point (PSAP) is the first point of contact for the caller in distress. Today people text 911 from their smart phones; they attempt video calls and other common means of communications. But most PSAPs can’t handle these modes of communication yet. A new design for the PSAP, using the WebRTC protocols and architectures will be described and its early implementation will be demonstrated. This solution benefits from the fact that the code for the PSAP 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. This is a new project and was begun in the fall of 2015.

IMS Performance Testing
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 will report their results, compare these to the performance of a non-IMS SIP network and explain 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.

Visit the Real-Time Communications Lab website