SIP Illustrated 3: Routing and IMS Registration

In the last post I promised that this time we will take a closer look on SIP headers which are related to routing. SIP routing is very flexible and most of the SIP textbooks are explaining it in a very general way. Here we focus only on routing in IMS context. We should also point out that there are two methods how to route SIP messages – so called strict routing and loose routing. As the strict rooting is obsolete since 2002 and 3GPP mandates only the loose routing for IMS, we will talk just about the loose routing.

The first and the most important header is the Request-Line, which contains the Request-URI. It allows us to route a SIP request directly to a Server. The response then follows the Via header. SIP Client and each proxy which wants to intercept the response adds itself into Via headers of the SIP request. During the processing of the response then each proxy removes its own Via record from the message. The Via header is also used to detect possible loops in signalling.

SIP Request – Response

 

In practice the UAs can’t see directly one each other and we have to use the IMS network to provide the routing. The first scenario we should go through is the IMS Registration. A VoLTE UE initiates a SIP REGISTER to the P-CSCF, using the P-CSCF IP that was made available during the LTE Attach. The Request-URI is set to the SIP-URI of the domain name of the home network.

SIP Illustrated 2: SIP Message

The general structure of a SIP message is based on Internet Message Format (RFC5322, RFC2822). With some minor differences in character sets the SIP message syntax is identical to HTTP 1.1 (but surely the SIP is not an extension of HTTP).

SIP Message

The SIP messages start with the Start-line, which is followed by a number of header fields in the format name:value. An empty line separates the header fields from the optional message body. As the SIP is a textual protocol, with just a little practice with Wireshark or a similar tool, it is not that difficult to analyze the massages. But to truly understand the headers in the context of IMS requires some experience. In this post we will highlight the most important message parameters.

SIP Illustrated 1: Basics

In November 2000, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) was accepted by 3GPP as a signaling protocol of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network for IP-based streaming multimedia services. Later it was extended for video conferencing, streaming multimedia distribution, instant messaging, presence information, file transfer, etc.

SIP in VoLTE

The SIP protocol is easy to understand as it is text-based and practically derived from the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). SIP is very flexible and well designed for Internet telephony, on the other hand it has also some disadvantages and limitations. If you’re new to IMS signalling or you just need some brief introduction into SIP, I hope you’ll find this post useful.