To describe a single SIP Session in IMS is not that easy as it maybe sounds and in the beginning it requires a lot of simplification. The purpose of the signaling over SIP is to establish a multimedia session over RTP (or MSRP). That means that SIP helps to locate the recipient and to negotiate the parameters of the RTP session. To do that we need one more protocol, called Session Description Protocol (SDP) which SIP carries in its body. The procedures for IMS describing this mechanism can be found in 3GPP 24.229.
SIP 3 Way Handshake
To set up a session the SIP protocol mandates the SIP INVITE request. It has to be answered by some final response – ideally with 200 OK. To confirm, that the client received the 200 OK message, it sends a special request SIP ACK. The SIP ACK is the only SIP request which doesn’t trigger any response on the server side. The procedure is also known as SIP 3-way handshake.
In this post we will go through a basic VoLTE flow from the SIP and SDP point of view.
Real Time Communication 