Managing feature interactions between distributed SIP call control services
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is widely used as a call control protocol for Voice over IP (VoIP), and indeed commercial implementations are readily available off-the-shelf. SIP supports flexible service provisioning not only through third parties, but also end-users. Laboratory experience shows that as these services are interworking they are subject to the feature interaction problem. Feature interactions may considerably delay service deployment and hence are a threat to rapid service provisioning. This paper investigates the feature interaction problem in SIP-based services and investigates the application of a pragmatic approach. This runtime approach does not require any detailed information about the services and hence can be applied in a competitive market. Furthermore, the technique is particularly strong in handling interactions between distributed services  a key characteristic of SIP-based services. Moreover, the approach is fully distributed without any centralised components, and includes detection and resolution of feature interactions.
feature interaction sip session initiation protocol voice over ip runtime approach telecommunications services