Session initiation protocol for wireless channels

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) was designed for wire line networks. It was developed to initiate, modify and terminate sessions between two hosts on a network. When the Internet expanded to include wireless hosts, SIP did not scale well for these wireless hosts because of the nature of the wireless channel. Also, there were issues with mobility and real time communication. This thesis proposes improvements to some of the extensions to SIP, for better performance over wireless channels. We investigate the call setup time for various transport mechanisms viz. TCP and UDP, and study the performance of a dynamic Session Timers compared to the current standard of a periodic refresh mechanism, where the frequency of UPDATEs vary with the condition of the wireless channel. We also propose a handoff algorithm that reduces the handover time with decreased packet losses