Service Location using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

Service location is a crucial part of dynamic systems that are using other services in order to accomplish their work. Beside service oriented architectures (SOA), multimedia networks need to dynamically access services on demand. Usually, service-location protocols support users at finding services. Therefore, in dynamic environments, the implementation of one of these protocols and an appropriate infrastructure is needed. We propose the integration of service location with the session initiation protocol (SlP), which is a common coordination protocol for multimedia services. With only small extensions on top of the classical SIP implementation, nodes may register and search for services (e.g., searching for video-on-demand servers with special capabilities), thus, omitting the additional overhead of implementing separate discovery services. Our solution is compliant to the SIP standard and can offer the same level of flexibility as common service-location protocols, however, reducing the processing complexity at the SIP-based devices