I am implementing a real time – multi user voice transfer application for Android.
I have read that, as a standard – RTP packets are encapsulated into SIP and then sent to destination(s). What is the advantage of doing so?
my idea was to use a server, just to receive control messages from nodes and open sockets. All these nodes would be in 1 group. THen, I send out the IP addresses of each of these nodes, so that a single sender can multicast its packets directly to the destination.
is there a fatal flaw here? ( iam not concerned about the power consumption)
How does SIP do better? or does it ?
Thanks
SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is a protocol that was designed specifically to address the problem you’re trying to solve. Generally, the reason you should reuse (rather than reinvent the wheel) is because other people have studied the same problem and presumably have come up with a better solution as a collective group than you could as an individual. Of course that’s not always true, but generally speaking it holds!
If you want to learn about SIP you could study the RFC 3261 specification, or start with the Wikipedia entry if you want a quick overview.
That being said, if you don’t need the overhead of a complete and carefully tested protocol you could roll your own but make sure that when you’re making that decision you know what you’re foregoing and have a good reason to do so.
SIP is a signaling protocol that usually runs over TCP (although not required) and if you look at it closely you will see it is very similar to HTTP in many respects. Just like HTTP it can transport a great deal of payloads and it does so with text headers, much like HTTP can be used to transport HTML, XML, plain text or any arbitrary binary payload.