Interoperability in SIP – state of the Art? - Part I

SIP today is a standard-de-facto, “The Protocol” which runs our multimedia communication. I believe nobody would argue with this statement. All the vendors have their SIP based equipment in the field, so considering the level of maturity of the protocol (about 10+ years old) and more than 20 SipIt events -(SIPit IOT events) as well as numerous IOT events by other consortia and standard bodies, we can expect that majority of devices on the market are highly interoperable.

Right? Well, not exactly.

At the last IETF meeting in December 2007, I attended SIPREAL, s a SIP Forum workshop on SIP Interoperability. The reason for even conducting such a workshop at the IETF meeting was a general concern with the state of the interoperability in the SIP world.

Interoperability and Art

As the title says, we should be making a parallel with Art - so if you consider the world of Art, paintings specifically:

• On one side of the spectrum we have classicism. There, you can seek a motivation of the artist, but when you look at the portrait or particular scene, this is a portrait or particular scene, no matter how you will interpret what you see.
• The next stage is impressionism (my favorite, if you wonder) - there, you need to use your imagination sometimes, but it is amazing how seemingly unconnected little touches of paint come together into a picture which is, well, again is relatively easy to interpret and understand.
• Surrealism, as the next level, will task your brain higher in terms of understanding and interpretation, but once you conquer it, I guess there is a feeling of satisfaction.
• And then comes modernism. Outside of monumental simplicity of a Black Square (btw, an important symbol when it comes to high tech today), try to get an idea of what all those colored geometry samples mean - and see if your interpretation will match the one of your neighbor (should be interesting, huh?).

Well, do we need to take a wild guess as to which style represents Interoperability in SIP the closest? Yep, you got that exactly right - modernism is the correct answer. Every little element (read - some SIP device by some manufacturer) is very colorful and almost perfect. Once those pieces are put together - go figure…

Part 2 of this post can be found here.