comparison of stronghstrong.323 and sip for ip telephony signaling.pdfVIP

header for SPIE use Comparison of H.323 and SIP for IP Telephony Signaling a b Ismail Dalgic , Hanlin Fang a3Com Corporation Technology Development Center 5400 Bayfront Plaza, M/S 3219, Santa Clara, CA 95052 bCisco Systems 170 West Tasman Dr., San Jose, CA 95134 ABSTRACT Two standards currently compete for the dominance of IP telephony signaling: the H.323 protocol suite by ITU-T, and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) by IETF. Both of these signaling protocols provide mechanisms for call establishment and teardown, call control and supplementary services, and capability exchange. We investigate and compare these two protocols in terms of Functionality, Quality of Service (QoS), Scalability, Flexibility, Interoperability, and Ease of Implementation. For fairness of comparison, we consider similar scenarios for both protocols. In particular, we focus on scenarios that involve a gatekeeper for H.323, and a Proxy/Redirect server for SIP. The reason is that medium-to-large IP Telephony systems are not manageable without a gatekeeper or proxy server. We consider all three versions of H.323. In terms of functionality and services that can be supported, H.323 version 2 and SIP are very similar. However, supplementary services in H.323 are more rigorously defined, and therefore fewer interoperability issues are expected among its implem