Kernel and File System Optimization for Embedded VoIP Phone

Abstract

Voice over IP is an emerging technology that enables voice communication over the Internet using the Internet Protocol. It is the process of breaking up audio or video into small chunks, transmitting those chunks over an IP n/w & resembling those chunks at the far end so that two people can communicate. It is cost-saving approach compared to traditional telephony approach. Project VoIP aims to develop a VoIP phone to capitalize this opportunity. The Flash memory requirements for an Embedded Device are dependent upon the Size of the Operating System. The limited built-in configurability of Linux can lead to size overhead when it is used in embedded system like VoIP phone. The built in configuration options in Linux are not engineered for producing smallest kernel, but rather for enabling the kernel’s deployment on a wide range of general-purpose systems. To remove the overhead in kernel & optimization of kernel according to hardware & software requirements for VoIP phone is a major task. VoIP application is a kind of real-time application. The performance of kernel should be improved for an application like VoIP. To improve kernel performance, it should have low scheduler latency. So, this scheduler latency needs to be reduced for VoIP phone. The root file system is needed in VoIP phone to hold the VoIP application & which enables the interaction of the application to the kernel & low-level hardware. The most critical part of an embedded system is boot loader. It is needed to start the operating system. This Thesis addresses the issues of optimizing the Kernel, reducing Scheduler latency, preparing Boot loader and creating & optimizing the Root File System according to hardware and software requirements of a VoIP phone.