SIP/XMPP Gateway¶

Background¶

Interoperability between XMPP and SIP protocol has become a necessity given that all closed and public Internet Services for Real Time Communications have migrated to a variant of these protocols, if not internally at least at their borders. Both protocols share common features, the most important one being the usage of Internet identifiers in the form of user@domain and replace the need for classic telephone numbers.

Motivation¶

Various projects in the open source domain emerged to tackle the interoperability between XMPP and SIP but all focused on one-to-one Presence signaling or VoIP, but never in the context of complete interoperability for all signaling and media. SylkServer XMPP gateway application goal is to cover this gap and provide an open source implementation for interoperability for all relevant media types and multimedia conferencing for them.

The goal is to implement a bidirectional signaling and media gateway for Presence, Session based Instant Messaging, Multiparty IM, Audio, and File Transfer for SIP and XMPP signaling protocols, RTP and MSRP media planes. This software will work with ZERO configuration, a simple command like "apt-get install sylkserver" will be enough for deployment of the gateway on a Debian Linux OS. We consider Video beyond the basic need of interoperability but this may change at a later time.

Sponsors¶

This research and development is part of the WormHole Project sponsored by NLNet and AG Projects.

Deployment Scenario¶

By pointing the correspondent DNS records for SIP or XMPP services of a given Internet domain to the address of this gateway, any packet sent to or connection established to the gateway by one of the protocols is transparently translated into the other. The server is designed in such way that it requires zero-configuration (except of course for the DNS domains configuration).

Specifications and Standards¶

SIP Signaling and Media¶

• SIP (RFC3261) and related RFCs for DNS, SDP, ICE, RTP (too many to mention)
• MSRP Protocol http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4975
• MSRP Relay extension http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4976
• MSRP Alternative Connection Model (ACM) //tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6135
• Multi-party Chat Using MSRP http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-simple-chat-14

XMPP Signaling and Media¶

• XMPP core (RFC 6120) http://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc6120.html
• XMPP extensions http://xmpp.org/xmpp-protocols/xmpp-extensions
• Instant Messaging and Presence http://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc6121.html
• Multi-User Chat http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html
• File Transfers http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0096.html
• Audio and Video Jingle http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0166.html
• Audio and Video Jingle RTP http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0167.html
• Audio and Video Jingle ICE (UDP) http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0176.html
• Delivering Conference Information to Jingle Participants http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0298.html

Protocol Translation Specifications¶

• XMPP - SIP Core Interworking
• XMPP - SIP Presence
• XMPP - SIP Message
• XMPP - MSRP Chat
• XMPP - MSRP Group Chat

Lessons learned during implementation and Suggestions for improvement of Protocol Translation Specifications

Progress¶

Completed items are operational on SIP2SIP which supports Chat and Presence to gmail.com an jabber.org domains. Progress announcements are made on SIP beyond VoIP mailing list

Completed Items¶

• Software Library Analysis
• Gateway Design
• SIP-XMPP Chat
• SIP-XMPP Presence
• SIP-XMPP Multiparty Chat

Roadmap¶

• Public Release of SylkServer (scheduled in September 2012)
• SIP-XMPP Jingle Audio
• SIP-XMPP File Transfer