Sip Snooping Overview - Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 9900 Series Network Configuration Manual

Configuring SIP Snooping

SIP Snooping Overview

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an IETF-defined signaling protocol widely used for controlling
communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP). The protocol can be
used for creating, modifying and terminating media sessions. Sessions may consist of one or several media
streams.
Other SIP applications include video conferencing, streaming multimedia distribution, instant messaging,
presence information, file transfer and online games.
The SIP protocol is an Application Layer protocol designed to be independent of the underlying Transport
Layer. SIP can run on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), or
Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). It is a text-based protocol, incorporating many elements of
the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
The SIP Snooping feature is provided to address the key challenge of real time delivery and monitoring
requirements for media streams from SIP devices. The feature allows automatic detection of SIP and its
corresponding media streams.
The network is the most critical part of the enterprise infrastructure in delivering diverse applications.
Ever increasing applications and their need for network resources keep demand on networks high.
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Critical applications like real-time voice, video, and mission critical data applications continue to grow.
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Bandwidth needs are growing at a faster pace than the network technologies that need to address them.
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Elastic traffic, such as TCP-based non-real time traffic, tends to use any additional bandwidth
available.
It is essential to differentiate the various types of traffic, based on application, user, and context, and
provide applicable service levels for each.
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Voice and video traffic should be prioritized over non-voice traffic.
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Mission critical data traffic should be provided a bandwidth guarantee for better performance.
The network should be able to monitor the quality of this traffic and inform the user if it is not within the
required expectation. SIP Snooping addresses this issue for media streams managed by SIP.
The SIP snooping feature snoops voice quality metrics of media streams from their corresponding control
packets and displays them to the user with knowledge of media reception quality in real time and helps to
diagnose the problems on their quality. In addition, a trap is generated when the voice quality parameters
crosses a user configured threshold.
OmniSwitch AOS Release 8 Network Configuration Guide December 2017
SIP Snooping Overview
page 14-5