SIP: The S is for Sizzle

As he wrote last month, Greg Galitzine, our long-time Executive Editor, is moving onward and upward to devote more time and energy to our fabulous web resource, tmcnet.com.

As for myself, Greg’s replacement, some of you may remember me as the fellow who founded VON Magazine for Jeff Pulver. Others of you with longer memories may recall that I was Chief Technical Editor of Computer Telephony magazine (later known as Communications Convergence (News - Alert) ), where I worked with the inimitable Harry Newton and editor Rick Luhmann for many years.

In any case, I now find myself at the helm of three of TMC’s most illustrious magazines: Internet Telephony, IMS and of course SIP.

SIP, that text-based signaling protocol for creating, modifying and terminating sessions involving Internet phone calls, multimedia transmissions and multimedia conferences, has come along way since its original formulation by Columbia University’s Henning Schulzrinne. This magazine is in a sense a celebration of both SIP’s triumph over competitors such as H.323, and its evolution from a lightweight transport-independent protocol living in the shadow of its brethren, HTTP and SMTP, to its many present-day roles serving as the basis of all IP Communications.

SIP appears both in the voice world and in the world of Instant Messaging as the open standard, SIMPLE ( Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions), an IM and presence protocol suite. Moreover, thanks to products from companies such as Ubiquity Software (News - Alert) and dynamicsoft, SIP-based applications of arbitrary complexity can now run in the network.

And that leads us to IMS ( IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) ), which takes SIP to it highest conceptual level, making it a part of a common service architecture for both wireless and wireline services. Sonus (www.sonusnetworks.com) and Cantata (www.cantata.com) recently announced an agreement to work together to deliver IMSready applications and services to network operators. Cantata’s SnowShore IP Media Server will be integrated with Sonus’ IMS-ready ASX Feature Server and IM Media Application Platform, facilitating the delivery of SIP and VoiceXML-based network applications. (For articles devoted to IMS, check out TMC’s magazine on the subject.)

Of course, somebody has to verify that the new incarnations of SIP are doing their job. The rise of SIP took some testing equipment vendors and labs by surprise, but that’s rapidly changing, as we reveal in the article on SIP testing in this issue and our Q&A with Prof. Carol Davids, Director of the VoIP Laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. Indeed, just as this issue was about to go to press, it was announced that a new $5 million 3G/IMS networking lab at Georgia Tech would be dedicated by Siemens Networks LLC. The lab’s co-sponsors include Cingular (News - Alert) Wireless, the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) and the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center (GT_RNOC). Initially, it will be used by those students participating in the IMS Research Competition, which will award winning students with a total of $100,000 in cash prizes. (Makes me wish I was a student again!)

SIP steadily becomes ever-more ubiquitous, and its continuing success reflects the success of IP Communications in general. We at TMC hope that you’ll follow SIP-based products and services, both in this magazine and on our amazingly high-ranked web resource, tmcnet.com.

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC's IP Communications Group.