Functional testing of VoIP infrastructure

 Sometimes, it's really hard to test VoIP infrastructure in an automated way. The usual way of testing any telco system is to take a phone, make some calls and that's it. Maybe to look at the logs. 

Some of the engineers going further and using famous SIPP, which is quite good in testing low-level SIP, but really could be a pain in some closer-to-world scenarios.

Another approach is to write some scripts and automating Asterisk or FreeSWITCH to do some test calls. And it's a good approach, but sometimes writing something simple could take a lot of time. And attention.

But there is one more way - use standalone SIP libraries like baresip or pjsip and control them via API or CLI.

Exactly this way was taken by Julien Chavanton in his voip_patrol project. After a short time of playing around with it, I can say it's a really good combination of simplicity of things it can test and a way it's configuring.

In my current position, I'm dealing mostly with opus/SRTP media (in DTLS-SRTP flavor) and I was able to add support of this  to voip_patrol (in this branch) and it's working well with rtpengine provided SRTP.

And here is just an example of voip_patrol scenario to register TLS endpoint, make a call with SRTP and catch it back. So, a simple register-call test as a good starting point for more complex scenarios. 

 

<config>
  <actions>
  <action type="codec" disable="all"/>
    <action type="codec" enable="pcma" priority="250"/>
    <action type="codec" enable="pcmu" priority="249"/>
    <action type="register" label="Register 88881"
            transport="tls"
            account="88881"
            username="88881"
            password="XXXXX"
            registrar="XXXXX"
            realm="XXXXX"
            expected_cause_code="200"
            srtp="dtls,sdes,force"
    />
    <action type="wait" complete="true"/>
    <action type="accept" label="Receive all calls"
            account="default"
            hangup="10"
            code="200" reason="OK"
            transport="tls"
            srtp="dtls,sdes,force"
    />
    <action type="call" label="Call to 88881"
            transport="tls"
            expected_cause_code="200"
            caller="88882@XXXXX"
            callee="88881@XXXXX"
            from="sip:88882@XXXXX"
            to_uri="88881@XXXXX"
            max_duration="20" hangup="16"
            username="88882"
            password="XXXXX"
            realm="XXXXX"
            rtp_stats="true"
            max_ringing_duration="15"
            srtp="dtls,force"
            play="/git/voip_patrol/voice_ref_files/reference_8000_12s.wav"
    />
    <action type="wait" complete="true"/>
  </actions>
</config>

 

For more advanced, I suggest to look on issues [1, 2] on GitHub, where author expands some concepts.

And as a good quickstart - video from author

UPDATE: Based on this tool, templating and reporting suite VOLTS was created. Stay tuned for more cool features to come!