How to read tcpdump – Registration

In telco tracing has always been very important. It helps us to understand the flows, the content and – sure – to find bugs. SS7 used to be much more strict and we didn’t need to go in the detail traces that often. The flow and a few fields was usually enough. With SIP and SDP it is a different story. SIP is a very flexible protocol. That means powerful but also complex and sometimes quite confusing.

Let’s take a look on IMS Registration. I’m sure you remember the idea behind from a previous posts about Registration and 3rd party registration and at least the basic flow:

 

IMS Registration

The registration flow is very important – in practice if something goes wrong, it is most probably registration. Once is a subscriber correctly registered,  the other flows (call, sms, fileshare) usually works fine.

There are many documents describing the message flow and important values. For VoLTE I’d recommend to go through VoLTE Service Description and Implementation Guide or A Definitive Guide to Successful Deployments. Would you have any doubts about a particular header please refer to http://www.iana.org/assignments/sip-parameters/sip-parameters.xhtml. Now let’s go through the particular messages.

Much Ado about Registration

Registration is something what was missing in the times of wires. Ok, not completely but it was done more or less once when an MSISDN was assigned to some line.

IMS Registration

In contrast to the previous types of the networks the 4G network is ‘user-centric’. It means the user can use multiple devices and identities and we have to deal with it. The main purpose of the registration is to create a binding between user (her public identity) and IP address of the device, so we know where we can send the data to. That’s why there is a Contact header in the SIP REGISTER message. The Contact header contains an address which identifies the current location of the user (Point-of-Presence – e.g. IP/FQDN of a particular client). During the registration is the Contact Address is linked to a Public Identity (IMPU, AOR in SIP terminology). The IMPU is an equivalent to MSISDN in GSM and has to be present in the To header of the SIP REGISTER. One identity can by used by more terminals and as each terminal can have different capabilities this has to be also taken into account. This information is part of the Contact header.

Contact: <sip:119560022547@152.67.235.234:49635;transport=tcp>;
   expires=3200;
   +g.oma.sip-im;
   language="en,fr";
   +u.asmc.apn="6a6044869e2aba3d23d4cfc0ef1384d00da28854c2408ddbbf";
   +sip.instance="<urn:uuid:D4196919-ED8A-4E00-9436-B9CDD1E76813>"