Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is revolutionizing telecom and enterprise network infrastructure and services. It represents a shift from proprietary switching technologies to a computing-centric infrastructure based on an IP network with standard server hardware with protocol support in software. Most of the work in SIP currently does a per-application deployment (each application using its own SIP stack), leading to narrowly focussed development of SIP based services. In this project, we develop a unified SIP framework, available as an OS level service, which can be exploited to enable existing collaborative applications with VoIP as well provide an infrastructure to develop new ones. As part of the network infrastructure to support such a generic framework, we developed a conference server with "ad-hoc" on-the-fly conferencing support; a game server, which acts like a middleware to manipulate SIP sessions; and a client-side SIP service, which exposes underlying SIP functions as an API. The composition of these building blocks allows for creating richer applications.

Such a framework also found a very apt application in multiplayer networked games. We used SIP to provide context-aware VoIP support in such environments. Thus, in addition to allowing players to talk to each other to coordinate teammates and activities (through a static team-based audio conference) as in some of the current systems, our design supports communication among players based on shared contexts like the same physical location or room within the gaming environment. Subsequently, such an architecture can be extended to provide mechanisms in which VoIP is used to relay information about another player's distance and location with respect to the recipient, e.g. players farther away sound farther away.

Aameek Singh
Arup Acharya
Priya Mahadevan
Zon-Yin Shae

Aameek Singh, Arup Acharya, Priya Mahadevan, Zon-Yin Shae, "SPLAT: A Unified SIP Services Platform for VoIP Applications", In International Journal of Communication Systems (Special Issue on VoIP - Theory and Practice), Volume-19, Issue-4, 2006.

Aameek Singh, Arup Acharya " Multiplayer Networked Gaming with the Session Initiation Protocol ", In Elsevier Computer Networks Journal (Special Issue on Networking Issues in Entertainment), Volume-49, Issue-1, 2005.

Aameek Singh, Arup Acharya " Using Session Initiation Protocol to build Context-Aware VoIP Support for Multiplayer Networked Games", Proceedings of the third Workshop on Network and System Support for Games (NETGAMES), August 2004. |Slides|

Aameek Singh, Priya Mahadevan, Arup Acharya, Zon-Yin Shae, " Design and Implementation of SIP Network and Client Services ", Proceedings of the thirteenth International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), October 2004. |Slides|

"SIP based VoIP Multiplayer Network Games" with Arup Acharya (Filed Feb. 2004)

"Enabling Collaborative Applications with SIP-based VoIP" with Arup Acharya, Dilip Kandlur, Priya Mahadevan, Zon-Yin Shae (Filed Oct. 2003)

External Citations