The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a communications protocol for signaling and controlling multimedia communication sessions in applications of Internet telephony for voice and video calls, in private IP telephone systems, as well as in instant messaging over Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
The protocol defines the methodology of SIP communications and the specific format of messages exchanged for cooperation of the participants in multimedia sessions. SIP is designed to be independent of the underlying transport layer protocol, and can be used with the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). It is a text-based protocol, incorporating many elements of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
In this article we discussed top five open source sip libraries that developers / programmers can use to develop sip based applications .