An investigation of the influence of SIP message differentiation on the quality of unified communications

The rapid growth in market demands for high-quality, state-of-the-art, and reliable communication services increases the amount of session-control signaling, which is mainly based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Many research activities dealing with the Quality of Service (QoS) have been focused on media-related service components, whereas signaling-related service components have received not nearly as much attention. Thus, our research focuses on investigating and gaining more comprehensive understanding of the impact of SIP message differentiation on quality of Unified Communication (UC) services. Two experimental studies have been conducted considering voice/video calls and Instant Messaging (IM)/presence components of UC service. The obtained results indicate that increasing amount of signaling negatively impacts both signaling and media performance metrics of UC service. Our findings show that SIP messages differentiation does not influence the quality of UC service.