Developing Applications for Internet Telephony: A Case Study on the Use of Web Services for Conferencing in SIP Networks

Applications offered to end‐users as value‐added services play a vital role in the success of Internet telephony service providers. Today’s standard frameworks for developing them have several shortcomings that motivate the need for novel frameworks. Web services are an emerging paradigm for program‐to‐program interactions over the Internet. This paradigm is a prime candidate for application development in Internet Telephony because it may aid in addressing the drawbacks of today’s standard frameworks. This paper presents a case study that gives insights in the suitability of Web services as a standard framework for the development of conferencing applications in Internet Telephony. The case study includes the definition and the implementation of a novel Web service for conferencing, the implementation of the conference server in a SIP environment, the development of several conferencing applications (including a game), and performance evaluation. Based on this case study, we conclude that Web services are very promising for conferencing application development in Internet Telephony, especially as the performance can be significantly improved with the emerging techniques that are briefly discussed in the paper.