Session initiation protocol and Web services for next generation multimedia applications

This paper describes a framework for providing multimedia, multimodal, distributed services using the session initiation protocol (SIP) and Web services technologies. Within the framework, there is a service platform consisting of the SIP application server, which is used to build call routing/telephony and IMPP (instant message and presence) services using SIP servlets, and a Web application server. There are also distributed service building blocks providing basic building blocks such as an IVR system, media server, TTS server and conference server. All these building blocks from different vendors can be registered in the 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 an SIP interface for establishing IMPP and media sessions and with a SOAP interface for providing dynamic control information. The proposed framework will be beneficial to service developers so that they can use 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 interactions with different features at relatively low cost. It is shown that a number of innovative services could be built using this framework.