How Well Does JXTA Fit Peer-to-Peer SIP?

More and more people use voice over IP instead of traditional phone networks. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a protocol for session management in general, becomes the standard protocol in use. However, SIP relies on central servers. Thus, maintaining the infrastructure is costly. This results in the trend to transfer peer-to-peer (P2P) concepts to SIP to overcome administration efforts due to self-organisation of the participants. In this paper, we propose a novel JXTA-based P2P architecture for SIP signalling. JXTA is an open peer-to-peer platform, which provides basic infrastructure services for building P2P applications. Our concept does not need central entities for maintaining the SIP traffic, while maintaining compatibility with standard SIP. Additionally, we seamlessly added service location capabilities into our infrastructure to support service discovery in dynamic environments. We evaluated our concept in comparison to standard SIP within three scenarios: local area network, point- to-point network and wide area network. The results show that our approach compares well in terms of response time but results in more traffic for maintaining the peer-to-peer overlay.