Developing IP telephony laboratory and curriculum with private cloud computing

Abstract

Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony is growing rapidly in the telecommunication industry. Since IP Telephony curriculum is very new to IT education and also because of the high cost of laboratory equipment, there are very few universities that offer IP Telephony courses. The documentation on IP Telephony laboratory and curriculum is also under-developed. To meet the challenges of this new technology and the needs of IT students, in this paper, we explore how an IT Telephony laboratory can be built upon within the private cloud to serve the class. The main goal of this paper is to share our experience and solutions about building the private cloud computing infrastructure prototype for an IP telephony course. With private cloud computing, hardware resources are virtualized as a resource pool and are managed and maintained as a whole. As demands fluctuate, the CPU, storage, and memory will be dynamically allocated with cloud computing. The overall cost of installing and maintaining the laboratory was decreased considering licensing fees and hardware costs. This research can serve as a reference guide for other IT educators who want to deploy IP Telephony laboratory and curriculum in their institutions.