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Department for Electrical and Communications Engineering | Networking Laboratory |
Starting with a review of the basics of IP-based multimedia communications, we will explore the details of media announcements (SAP, SDP), Internet Media Guides (IMG), media streaming (RTSP), and as the focus of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as defined in RFC 3261 and may related documents. We will discuss concepts, protocol details, the concepts for SIP extensions, present SIP building blocks, and the various approaches to SIP-based service creation. Specific application scenarios to be discussed include telephony as well as instant messaging and personal presence. We will also address security and NAT/firewalls traversal. Finally, system design aspects (for endpoints as well as for infrastructures) will be investigated.
The course will combine lectures with practical coding assignments. The latter are meant to improve familiarity with protocol operation and implementation in a few selected areas. Coding assignments are to be done in small groups of two or three students. Practical assignments can be done as a follow-up on this course.
For questions concerning the course, please use the Newsgroup opinnot.sahko.s-38.tietoverkkotekniikka or Noppa or send mail to
The regular lectures and exercises will be held in the second period:
Tuesday, 8-10 (S1), Wednesday, 14-16 (S1), and
Thursday 10-12 (S4).
The lectures, exercises, and the exam will in English language.
To pass the course, the three coding assignments must be completed and the written exam must be passed.
The final grade will consider both on the written exam (about 70%) and the assignments (about 30%). To pass the course, 50% of the points in the assignments and 50% of the points in the exam must be achieved!
The final review date for the assignments will be announced later. Please complete your assignments and email them beforehand.
The assignments will have deadlines assigned which are indicative or hard (as will be indicated).
Please return the assignments prior to the deadline by sending an email with a tar or zip file containing the binary and source code. All the assigment submission must be send to Jegadish Devadoss <jegadish (at) netlab.tkk.fi> and Mikko Kiiski <makiiski (at) netlab.tkk.fi>The lecture material (slides) will be available in digital format (PDF) from this web page.
While there are many books on SIP and related standards, only few of them turn out to be really useful (rather than, e.g. outdated). The book by Gonzalo Camarillo provides a very good overview (but also discusses the 3GPP Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) which we do not address in this course).
For IP-based multimedia communications in general, there are not even many books (worth mentioning). A notable exception is: Colin Perkins, "RTP: Audio and Video for the Internet", Addison-Wesley, June 2003, ISBN 0-672-32249-8 (which, however, only covers a fraction of the course).
Therefore, rather than relying on books, we recommend to stick with primary material — in this case: RFCs and Internet Drafts — to which we will point for the individual lectures as far as possible. For parts of the coding assignments, it is essential read through pieces of the original documentation to properly interpret packet formats or protocol processing rules.
The following RFCs are likely to be useful (not just) for assignments 2 and 3. The Internet Drafts on RTSP and SDP just provide a view on the latest developments but today's client and server implementations will most likely stick to the respective RFCs.
The Internet Draft Tracker is useful to find any Internet Draft by name (and associated information).