Speaking of Standards

What happens when a 100 or so SIP developers and engineers get together with all their gear? Well, starting today at the University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Lab in Durham, NH, those developers will be participating in SIPit 22 and testing the interoperability of their solutions with those of everyone else. Sponsored by the SIP Forum and currently coordinated by Robert Sparks, the events provide a place for SIP implementors to test out how well their products work with others’. When you attend, you essentially arrange with others there to test your product with theirs and do so. The results are not published… it’s just a place for engineers/developers to go and work together on interop. Summaries of what occurred are released and you can get a sense of what goes one through the summary of SIPit 21 this past November in Beijing.

As you might expect, since I’m writing about this, one of our lead SIP developers is up there at SIPit 22 with our Prophecy product. As we’re working on some improvements in our SIP support that we’ll release in new versions of Prophecy over the next year or so, he’s looking forward to testing our new work and learning how well it works (or doesn’t work) with many other SIP implementations.

Given that SIP is composed of so many pieces and there are so many options in the way in which you can implement parts of SIP, events like SIPit that foster interoperability are really a key way to helping the industry grow. It’s great to see the SIP Forum continue to sponsor the SIPit events and we look forward to participating more in the future. Meanwhile, we’ll be very curious to see what results are brought home at the end of the week…

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sip, sip forum, sipit, standards, ietf, voxeo, prophecy

Out at IETF 70, the SIP Forum will also be holding their first “SIP Interoperability Workshop” on Monday, December 3rd, from 11:30am - 1:00pm at the Westin hotel in Vancouver where the IETF meetings will be held. From the SIP Forum website:

Co-located with the 70th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada, at the Westin Bayshore Resort & Marina, Monday, December 3, 2007, from 11:30am-1:00pm in Salon B, the SIP Forum’s SIP Interoperability Workshop will serve as a forum to bring together researchers, engineers, and service providers to exchange ideas, share experiences, and propose approaches to address interoperability problems.

The SIP Forum is actively seeking participation from attendees of IETF 70, and has made an official call for papers.

The Call for Papers (which closed on November 27th) and other information about the event can be found in this PDF document. Here is the relevant section about the aim of the workshop:

SIP has been gaining traction as a preferred network signaling protocol for real-time communications networks. There has been a considerable amount of low-level protocol testing and interoperability, such as provided by the SIP Interoperability Test event, or SIPit, which is in its seventh year. There are many independent implementations of
clients, servers, proxies, back-to-back User Agents, registrars, and the like. In addition, there are significant network deployments, many at scale.

While this is all good, deployment experience is showing that interoperability is difficult to achieve. Products from a single vendor tend to work well with each other. However, multi-vendor interoperability, especially above the basic stack level, has historically been difficult to achieve. In fact, the proof point of the success of vendors attending SIPit indicates interoperability problems may not be due to the specification itself.

This workshop serves as a forum to bring together researchers, engineers, and service providers to exchange ideas, share experiences, and propose approaches to address interoperability problems. Particular focus will be on systemic or architectural problems, as opposed to simple implementation errors.

If the workshop identifies concrete proposals to improve interoperability that would require modifications to the underlying protocols, these proposals will be forwarded to the appropriate groups in the IETF.

I’ll be there on Monday… if any of you are as well, I will look forward to seeing you there.

Technorati Tags:
ietf, sip, sip forum, interoperability