How to provision and manage off-the-shelf SIP phones in domestic and SOHO environments

Integrated services delivered over broadband connections are becoming the norm in domestic households, as it is the case with triple-play bundles which offer combined Voice, Television and Data services delivered using IP-based technologies and protocols. As a result, the usage of SIP-based (Session Initiation Protocol) VoIP devices has known a significant growth in domestic environments, either in the form of standalone (e.g. SIP telephones) or embedded devices (as it happens with some domestic gateways, which embed analog-to-SIP adaptors). For Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the provisioning and management of those devices is a challenge — especially standalone SIP phones, since most of them were exclusively designed for corporate LAN usage, not supporting adequate mechanisms for remote management over broadband access networks. In this paper we propose a framework which allows the integration of off-the-shelf SIP phones with the CWMP protocol suite, the prevailing standard for remote management of Customer Premises Devices (CPEs) in broadband access networks. This integration framework supports the vast majority of commercially available SIP phones whilst maintaining full compatibility with the original CWMP specification — thus allowing ISPs to reuse their CWMP management infrastructure to configure and provision off-the-shelf SIP telephones.