Voalté Application Background
The Voalté (pronounced Volt) clinical communications application is designed to provide enhanced, near instant, patient care communication in a hospital environment.
The Voalté application runs on the iPhone 3GS and above and uses a combination of local Voalté messaging servers on the customer premises and Apple Push Notification service (APNs) servers in Apple’s cloud to deliver these communications, while also integrating with Cisco Communications Manager.
In addition to allowing for user-to-user voice calls, the Voalté app leverages a local push feature to directly send messages between users logged into the local Voalté messaging server. In the event the message is not acknowledged within 60 seconds, the Voalté server will send the message to the Apple Push Notification service for later delivery.
Design Considerations To Support Voalté In A Cisco Network
Voalté, Cisco, and Apple are working together to deliver the best user experience possible when implementing the Voalté application in a production healthcare environment. Administrators should keep in mind the following recommendations when preparing to deploy the Voalté application…
QoS Tuning – As of the writing of this document (July 9th 2013) the Voalté application does not natively mark packets for QoS at either the user device, or server levels. By default, this traffic will be processed by the network as best effort traffic, rather than latency and delay sensitive Voice traffic.
It is recommended to provide Voice level QoS for this traffic via the network in other ways, such as marking the traffic based on source, destination, and/or traffic type.
Potential Delayed Messages & Roaming Issues on WiFi – In certain situations, Voalté application users may experience a delay in messages that are expected to arrive near instantly. In addition, roaming issues may be experienced that might result in dropped calls.
Cisco’s Wireless LAN Controller 7.4 MR1 code (scheduled for release August 2013) implements adjustments to help account for these situations and better support iOS products in an Enterprise environment.
Cisco recommends running Wireless LAN Controller 7.4 MR1 code when implementing the Voalté application in production on iOS devices.
Please contact your account team or voaltequestions@cisco.com with additional questions.
