Supporting Real-Time Faxing over the Internet

Most existing Internet faxing systems, which use Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and Transmission Control Protocol as the underlying transportation layer for fax delivery, are unable to support real-time fax delivery as traditional faxing. In this paper, an Internet real-time faxing system that supports real-time transmission of fax messages is described. The system is known as RTFaxing which consists of two gateways: Fax-In Gateway (FIG) and Fax-Out Gateway (FOG). FIG is responsible for the reception, processing, compression and transmission of fax-image data to FOG through the Internet. FOG then decompresses and reconstructs the fax-images for dispatching to the destination fax machines. Buffering mechanism, and adaptive control and recovery mechanism have been incorporated into the RTFaxing system to minimise the impact of delay jitters and packet loss.