NIST'S TEST TOOLS FOR INTERNET TELEPHONY WILL HELP INDUSTRY CONVERGE DISJOINT APPLICATIONS.

NIST recently released NIST SIP VO.9, the first component in a planned suite of instrumented protocols and related test tools intended to serve the emerging Internet telephony industry. In its initial release, NIST SIP provides a reference implementation for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The protocol appears likely to become the basis for signaling and dynamic service creation in peer-to-peer personal communications applications.

By providing natural integration with Web, e-mail, and voice telephone technologies, SIP will help industry to converge formerly disjoint applications. Examples of such applications might include call-forwarding or messaging services controlled by electronic calendars and business call centers that integrate automated voice response with Web page interactions. In addition to evolving in concert with the relevant IETF specifications, NIST SIP provides a public-domain software platform for industry and university researchers to experiment with service creation and with open, component-based approaches to implement distributed services from a loosely coupled set of composable components.

In the near future, industry expects to agree upon softswitch architectures, along with supporting service composition mechanisms. Anticipating these developments, NIST researchers already contribute to industry efforts to develop application programming interfaces (APIs) for SIP.