MURRAY HILL, N.J., April 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Technology Review, MIT's magazine of innovation, has selected Lucent Technologies' (NYSE: LU - News) patent for improving the quality of service for network traffic such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) as one of its 'Five Killer Patents'. The honor marks the third straight year that one of Lucent's patents from Bell Labs has been included on the publication's annual list of the five most important patents issued during the previous year. The list appears in the May 2004 issue of Technology Review and on the web at http://www.technologyreview.com/ (see current issue). This patent, U.S. No. 6,529,499, granted to Lucent on March 3, 2003, was also the 30,000th patent Bell Labs has received since its inception in 1925.

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"Bell Labs networking expertise is at the very heart of what makes Lucent a leader in making voice over IP more efficient, reliable and secure," said Bill O'Shea, president of Bell Labs and Lucent's executive vice president of corporate strategy. "This patented technique is one example of how Bell Labs is working to bring the quality of today's circuit-switched network to VoIP. This is an important, standards-based approach that represents Lucent's desire to vastly improve packet-based services for the industry."

Bell Labs tackles Voice over IP challenges

Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP, which Bell Labs helped develop, is a global, standards-based IP telephony signaling protocol primarily used for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls. SIP-based VoIP is a technology that holds tremendous promise for consumers and businesses alike. However, one of the major challenges with VoIP is that IP-based networks were designed to provide 'best effort' service for data applications, but couldn't provide the higher level of quality required by the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The potential of VoIP may remain largely unrealized until the service quality and reliability that people expect matches that of the PSTN.

Making VoIP more reliable is a difficult challenge because the Internet was not built for steady-state, real-time communications, such as voice calls and streaming video. In the circuit-switched world, network congestion is managed by reserving a point-to-point connection between two parities in a call. In a connectionless IP network, data packets are routed through the network with no regard for the congestion created by this traffic. This can result in lost or delayed traffic. That's acceptable for elastic applications such as email where lost packets are retransmitted, only delaying the delivery of the email. However, when packets are lost or delayed during real-time voice or other interactive communications, the person on the receiving end might hear part of some of the words, or their connection may be dropped altogether.

A major culprit in degrading Quality of Service (QoS) for VoIP and other real-time IP services is network capacity, and how that capacity is managed. By adding more VoIP calls and other traffic to the Internet, network links can become overburdened. As a result, everyone's experience tends to degrade. This drop in quality affects not only new calls being placed over the network, but also can impact calls in progress. Simply adding more capacity is not an effective solution, since network demand (traffic) continues to grow exponentially, and adding more capacity at the right places in the network requires careful planning and intricate knowledge of traffic demands, which is not readily available.

About the Patent: A Bell Labs' solution for VoIP

To alleviate this congestion, and improve VoIP quality, Bell Labs developed a software-based Virtual Provisioning Server and a "traffic cop" connection resource manager (CRM) that monitors network demand and creates 'virtual trunk groups' where information flows uninterruptedly between senders and receivers.

For example, when a user attempts to make a voice over IP call or to view a streaming video, the CRM checks whether there are enough network resources along a path to accommodate the request. If there are, then the new call is allowed and uninterrupted communication with acceptable loss and delay is guaranteed. If the path between sender and receiver does not have enough network capacity, new requests for sessions may be denied, then re-routed to a different path with enough capacity, thus preventing new any new sessions from adversely affecting ongoing VoIP conversations.

Bell Labs researchers Yung-Terng (Y.T) Wang of Bell Labs' Advanced Technology Group and Enrique Hernandez-Valencia of Lucent's Integrated Network Solutions Group in Holmdel, N.J., along with former colleagues Bharat Doshi, Kotikalapudi Sriram and On-Ching Yue, received this patent for their research. Since filing for the patent in September 1998, the Bell Labs inventors have leveraged the capabilities of Internet standards to evolve this technique. Additionally, they are working closely with Lucent's business units to build this capability into Lucent's Accelerate(TM) portfolio of VoIP solutions.

With Accelerate(TM) solutions, wireline and mobile service providers can rapidly deliver profitable IP-based voice, data and multimedia services. The solutions are built on top of an open industry standard services architecture, originally defined by the 3GPP/3GPP2 standards group, and referred to as IMS (IP Multimedia Solution). IMS fully supports the convergence of traditional voice services with multimedia services, including Web-based features. This allows service providers to offer consumers and enterprises new converged voice and data applications such as unified communications, multimedia messaging, location-based services, IP Centrex, and voice and data virtual private networks.

Previous Bell Labs patents selected by Technology Review for this honor include Bell Labs Layered Space-Time (BLAST), a method for vastly improving wireless network capacity; and Raman amplification, an innovative technique for extending the distance and capacity of optical networks. Technology Review's Patent Scorecard, also in the May 2004 issue, again ranks Lucent Technologies as #1 in overall technological strength in telecommunications, a spot Lucent has held during the previous six years on average. More information on this year's Killer Patent is on the web at: www.bell-labs.com/news/2003/march/patents.html.

About Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies

Bell Labs is the leading source of new communications technologies. It has generated more than 30,000 patents since 1925 and has played a pivotal role in inventing or perfecting key communications technologies, including transistors, digital networking and signal processing, lasers and fiber-optic communications systems, communications satellites, cellular telephony, electronic switching of calls, touch-tone dialing, and modems. Bell Labs scientists have received six Nobel Prizes in Physics, nine U.S. National Medals of Science and eight U.S. National Medals of Technology®. For more information about Bell Labs, visit its Web site at http://www.bell-labs.com/.

Lucent Technologies designs and delivers the systems, services and software that drive next-generation communications networks. Backed by Bell Labs research and development, Lucent uses its strengths in mobility, optical, software, data and voice networking technologies, as well as services, to create new revenue-generating opportunities for its customers, while enabling them to quickly deploy and better manage their networks. Lucent's customer base includes communications service providers, governments and enterprises worldwide. For more information on Lucent Technologies, which has headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J., USA, visit http://www.lucent.com/.