P2PSIP

Does Peer-to-Peer (P2P) SIP represent the future of SIP communication? Does it have the possibility to enable the creation of a peer-to-peer communication cloud that could rival Skype but be based on open standards? Where would P2P SIP fit? In an enterprise environment? consumer? What’s the technology behind it all, anyway?

Today’s Squawk Box was a fascinating one for those of us interested in the network level of how VoIP can all work. Today, pretty much all SIP-based telephony is “server-centric”. You have SIP servers to which SIP clients register. The SIP servers, be they IP-PBXs, call managers, whatever… control the overall conversation. But what if you could have SIP in a *serverless* environment? What if SIP endpoints could “self-organize” and create P2P clouds? How would this work? How secure would it be? Who would use it?

Our guest on the call was David Bryan, co-chair of the IETF’s P2PSIP Working Group and also CEO of SIPpeerior Technologies. We dove into all of those questions mentioned above and many more. It was quite an enjoyable and interesting call and we hope you find it helpful to understand this potential new way of organizing SIP communication.

Some links:

On the call: Dan York (host), Dameon Welch-Abernathy, James Body, Jim Courtney, William Volk, Ian Hood, Sergio Meinardi, Tom O’Connor.

Show notes and links can be found at either:

We thank David Bryan for joining us on the show.

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While I was on vacation, Aswath Rao published a pretty interesting piece titled OpenID Negates the Need for P2PSip. Here's what he's proposing:

I can store the IP address and the port number on which my SIP client will listen for incoming calls in a web page and my partner can visit that page before initiating a session request. This simple directory service almost eliminates the need for SIP proxies. Of course the problem is not fully solved because of the pesky NAT/FW traversal. If I am being served by a UPnP enabled router then the SIP client can establish the mapping rule; otherwise the web server can be used as the relaying point without requiring any SIP capabilities at all.

But with OpenID one can achieve something more. The web site can now provide the mapped IP address and port number by taking into account the OpenID of the initiator, just like Relevance Engine from iotum will do. What I mean is that the resultant mapping will be my SIP client for my family members and that of a voice mail server for business contacts, if the request is made on a weekend. I hope that after reading this Dean changes his mind regarding his remark about SIP not requiring the services of OpenID.

Very lightweight, and simple. He says that there will be an implementation available shortly. Cool!

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