Understanding the SIP Protocol

 

 

Contact

Contains a SIP or SIPS URI that represents a direct route to contact

 

Caller A, usually composed of a username at a fully qualified domain

 

name (FQDN). While an FQDN is preferred, many end systems do

 

not have registered domain names, so IP addresses are permitted.

 

While the Via header field tells other elements where to send the

 

response, the Contact header field tells other elements where to send

 

future requests.

Max-Forwards

Serves to limit the number of hops a request can make on the way to

 

its destination. It consists of an integer that is decremented by one at

 

each hop.

Content-Type

Contains a description of the message body (not shown).

Content-Length

Contains an octet (byte) count of the message body.

 

The details of the session, such as the type of media, codec, or

 

sampling rate, are not described using SIP. Rather, the body of a SIP

 

message contains a description of the session, encoded in some other

 

protocol format. One such format is the Session Description Protocol

 

(SDP) (RFC 2327 [1]). This SDP message (not shown in the example)

 

is carried by the SIP message in a way that is analogous to a

 

document attachment being carried by an email message, or a web

 

page being carried in an HTTP message.

 

Since the softphone does not know the location of Caller B or the SIP

 

server in the biloxi.com domain, the softphone sends the INVITE to

 

the SIP server that serves Caller A's domain, atlanta.com. The

 

address of the atlanta.com SIP server could have been configured in

 

Caller A's softphone, or it could have been discovered by the

 

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), for example.

 

The atlanta.com SIP server is a type of SIP server known as a proxy

 

server. A proxy server receives SIP requests and forwards them on

 

behalf of the requestor. In this example, the proxy server receives

 

the INVITE request and sends a 100 (Trying) response back to

 

Caller A's softphone. The 100 (Trying) response indicates that the

 

INVITE has been received and that the proxy is working on

 

Caller A’s behalf to route the INVITE to the destination. Responses

 

in SIP use a three-digit code followed by a descriptive phrase. This

 

response contains the same To, From, Call-ID, CSeq and branch

 

parameter in the Via as the INVITE, which allows Caller A's

 

softphone to correlate this response to the sent INVITE. The

 

atlanta.com proxy server locates the proxy server at biloxi.com,

 

possibly by performing a particular type of DNS (Domain Name

 

Service) lookup to find the SIP server that serves the biloxi.com

 

domain. This is described in [4]. As a result, it obtains the IP address

November 2009

250

Page 250
Image 250
Dialogic 6.2 manual Contact, November 250