 | Copyright © 2008, Juniper Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademark Notice. | |
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)-standard protocol for initiating, modifying, and terminating multimedia sessions over the Internet. Such sessions might include conferencing, telephony, or multimedia, with features such as instant messaging and application-level mobility in network environments.
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Before You Begin |
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For background information, read Application Layer Gateways (ALGs). |
J-series devices support SIP as a service and screen SIP traffic, allowing and denying it based on a policy that you configure. SIP is a predefined service in JUNOS software and uses port 5060 as the destination port.
SIP's primary function is to distribute session-description information and, during the session, to negotiate and modify the parameters of the session. SIP is also used to terminate a multmedia session.
Session-description information is included in INVITE and ACK messages and indicates the multimedia type of the session, for example, whether it is voice or video. Although SIP can use different description protocols to describe the session, the Juniper Networks SIP ALG supports only the Session Description Protocol (SDP).
SDP provides information that a system can use to join a multimedia session. SDP might include information such as IP addresses, port numbers, times, and dates. Note that the IP address and port number in the SDP header (the c= and m= fields, respectively) are the address and port where the client wants to receive the media streams and not the IP address and port number from which the SIP request originates (although they can be the same).
SIP messages consist of requests from a client to a server and responses to the requests from a server to a client with the purpose of establishing a session (or a call). A User Agent (UA) is an application that runs at the endpoints of the call and consists of two parts:
Examples of UAs are SIP proxy servers and phones.
This topic covers:
| Copyright © 2008, Juniper Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademark Notice. | |