Radvision helping others keep up with SIP

The economy isn’t the only thing holding back mass deployment of SIP-based technologies; interoperability caused by rapid-fire standard revisions plays its part. Radvision’s Technology Business Unit, released the latest versions of its ProLab test management suite for voice and video over IP and a new RFC 3261 compatible version of its SIP toolkit last week to help developers and equipment manufacturers build solutions that meet the latest requirements for interoperability.

Radvision’s ProLab test suite simulates the various elements of SIP and H.323 based networks, including the agent, gatekeeper, server, registrar and call generator. It also includes a test scheduler with over 400 built-in scripts.

The company’s SIP Toolkit version 2.2 includes the latest changes to the standard, including RFC 3261, for application developers writing user-agent applications for softswitches, gateways, multimedia servers and devices.

“During the development cycle and after, the developers need to test their product. In order to do that they need to simulate the entire network,” said Amir Zmora, product manager for SIP technologies at Radvision.

Zmora said changes are coming too quickly in SIP development for equipment makers and developers to keep up them. “There is a lot of work going on in SIP and that’s an advantage because it will develop faster,” Zmora said. “The problem is that with SIP, it is not always backward compatible and doesn’t interoperate with earlier versions.”

RFC 3261, which came out last month, is such a revision. It was a major change in the SIP standard and is helping to drive the reliance on commercial toolkits such as those provided by Radvision. The company’s toolkit includes a full library of SIP-specific functionality, including message encoding and decoding, transaction and call management and various extensions, including REFER, which supports the development of transfer and third party call control services. It also includes support for IPv6.

“We believe SIP will be massively deployed, but we see a lot of complexity and changes in the protocol. As that complexity grows and the need for development get stronger, you will see a tendency to move to commercial software stacks,” Zmora said.