- published: 14 May 2016
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The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an IETF-defined signaling protocol widely used[citation needed] for controlling communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP). The protocol can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party (unicast) or multiparty (multicast) sessions. Sessions may consist of one or several media streams.
Other SIP applications include video conferencing, streaming multimedia distribution, instant messaging, presence information, file transfer and online games[citation needed].
The SIP protocol is an Application Layer protocol designed to be independent of the underlying Transport Layer; it can run on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), or Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). It is a text-based protocol, incorporating many elements of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
SIP was originally designed by Henning Schulzrinne and Mark Handley in 1996. In November 2000, SIP was accepted as a 3GPP signaling protocol and permanent element of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture for IP-based streaming multimedia services in cellular systems. The latest version of the specification is RFC 3261 from the IETF Network Working Group published in June 2002.