Impact of VoIP and QoS on Open and Distance Learning

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming a reality in many organizations. The potential for mobility in voice over wi-fi networks will derive demand for the technology. Wireless VoIP is poised to rival VoIP as an alternative telephony tool. Internet has been used to transport data in the form of packet. In the past, Internet did not support any kind of sophisticated quality of service (QoS) mechanism. Although the type of service (TOS) field in the Internet protocol (IP) header has been existing and has been allowing the differentiated treatment of packets, it was never really used on a large scale. The voice is sensitive to delay and jitter so bandwidth must be guaranteed while transporting it. With the extensive use of Internet for carrying voice, there is a need to add QoS functionality in it. QoS with reference to VoIP has been discussed in the paper. Limited bandwidth and network latency are the issues which need to be considered while using wireless LAN for packetized voice data. Efforts of standards like 802.11e which will take care of these issues, have also been explored. The impact of these technologies on distance education has also been explored in the paper.