A Methodology for SIP and SOAP Integration Using Application-Specific Protocol Conversion

In recent years, the ubiquitous demands for cross-protocol application access are driving the need for deeper integration between SIP and SOAP. In this article we present a novel methodology for integrating these two protocols. Through an analysis of properties of SIP and SOAP we show that integration between these protocols should be based on application-specific converters. We describe a generic SIP/SOAP gateway that implements message handling and network and storage management while relying on application-specific converters to define session management and message mapping for a specific set of SIP and SOAP communication nodes. In order to ease development of these converters, we introduce an XML-based domain-specific language for describing application-specific conversion processes. We show how conversion processes can be easily specified in the language using message sequence diagrams of the desired interaction. We evaluate the presented methodology through performance analysis of the developed prototype gateway and high-level comparison with other solutions.