Session initiation protocol and web services for next generation multimedia applications

This paper describes a framework for providing multimedia, multimodal, distributed services using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Web Services technologies. Within the framework, there is a service platform consisting of SIP application server, which is used to build call routing/telephony and IMPP (Instant Message and Presence) services using SIP servlets, and Web application server. In the framework, there are also distributed service building blocks providing basic building blocks such as IVR system, media server, TTS server and conference server. All these building blocks from different vendors can be registered in UDDI registry for dynamic binding at run time. SOAP is used to transfer control information among different components. Meanwhile, the building blocks can be packaged as deployable units with SIP interface for establishing IMPP & media sessions and with SOAP interface to provide dynamic control information. The proposed framework will be beneficial to service developers so that they can use the familiar Web development tools instead of proprietary APIs to develop new media applications. It will be also useful for service providers or integrators to easily and quickly deploy new services, which are allowed to be distributed remotely and configured using standard protocols. In addition, the proposed framework will be helpful for end users to access innovative multimedia services, which offer the interactions with different features at quite low cost. In this paper, it is shown that a number of innovative services could be built using this framework.