Enabling SIP-based sessions in ad hoc networks

The deployment of infrastructure-less ad hoc networks is suffering from the lack of applications in spite of active research over a decade. This problem can be solved to a certain extent by porting successful legacy Internet applications and protocols to the ad hoc network domain. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is designed to provide the signaling support for multimedia applications such as Internet telephony, Instant Messaging, Presence etc. SIP relies on the infrastructure of the Internet and an overlay of centralized SIP servers to enable the SIP endpoints discover each other and establish a session by exchanging SIP messages. However, such an infrastructure is unavailable in ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose two approaches to solve this problem and enable SIP-based session setup in ad hoc networks (i) a loosely coupled approach, where the SIP endpoint discovery is decoupled from the routing procedure and (ii) a tightly coupled approach, which integrates the endpoint discovery with a fully distributed cluster based routing protocol that builds a virtual topology for efficient routing. Simulation experiments show that the tightly coupled approach performs better for (relatively) static multihop wireless networks than the loosely coupled approach in terms of the latency in SIP session setup. The loosely coupled approach, on the other hand, generally performs better in networks with random node mobility. The tightly coupled approach, however, has lower control overhead in both the cases. This work was partially done while the author was a graduate student in CReWMaN, University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Nilanjan Banerjee is a Senior Research Engineer in the Networks Research group at Motorola India Research Labs. He is currently working on converged network systems. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science and engineering from University of Texas at Arlington. He received his B.E. degree in the same discipline from Jadavpur University, India. His research interests include telecom network architectures and protocols, identity management and network security, mobile and pervasive computing, measures for performance, modeling and simulation, and optimization in dynamic systems. Dr Arup Acharya is a Research Staff Member in the Internet Infrastructure and Computing Utilities group at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and leads the Advanced Networking micropractice in On-Demand Innovation Services. His current work includes SIP-based services such as VoIP, Instant Messaging and Presence, and includes customer consulting engagements and providing subject matter expertise in corporate strategy teams. Presently, he is leading a IBM Research project on scalability and performance of SIP servers for large workloads. In addition, he also works on different topics in mobile/wireless networking such as mesh networks. He has published extensively in conferences/journals and has been awarded seven patents. Before joining IBM in 2000, he was with NEC C&C Research Laboratories, Princeton. He received a B.Tech degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and a PhD in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 1995. Further information is available at Dr. Sajal K. Das is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and also the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN) at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). His current research interests include sensor networks, resource and mobility management in wireless networks, mobile and pervasive computing, wireless multimedia and QoS provisioning, wireless internet architectures and protocols, grid computing, applied graph theory and game theory. He has published over 400 research papers in these areas, holds four US patents in wireless internet and mobile networks. He received Best Paper Awards in IEEE PerCom’06, ACM MobiCom’99, ICOIN’02, ACM MSwiM’00 and ACM/IEEE PADS’97. He is also recipient of UTA’s Outstanding Faculty Research Award in Computer Science (2001 and 2003), College of Engineering Research Excellence Award (2003), the University Award for Distinguished record of Research (2005), and UTA Academy of Distinguished Scholars Award (2006). He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal, and as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM/Springer Wireless Networks, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He has served as General or Program Chair and TPC member of numerous IEEE and ACM conferences. He is a member of IEEE TCCC and TCPP Executive Committees.