Peer to Peer SIP VOIP network

While lurking around on the Internet trying to find that next big thing in VOIP. I stumbled on a to a great concept called "Peer to Peer SIP". This might not be very new concept and am sure people in VOIP industry must have already thought about it. It just sounds interesting that if SIP can be put on a peer to peer network, how efficient and easy the communication could be. Can this actually beat skype? We all know how skype gained popularity. The biggest advantage of using skype is it works even on low bandwidth network with the use of supernodes technology (primarily P2P).

Due to sharing bandwidth and resources over the skype network, users get awesome voice quality on skype. This is purely dependent on supernodes p2p technology which is often challenging when it comes to security. We wrote an article on how supernodes can be insecure on VOIP networks.

So coming back to SIP over P2P protocol, we found a website dedicated to this, its called P2PSIP.org, its like a open source initiative towards building a secure P2P SIP network. However its far more difficult than it sounds. We had a closer look at some of the white papers, Discussions and presentations on P2PSIP resource website.

What challenges this VOIP technolgy will face?

1) Security: Everyone know its far easy to crack a Peer to peer network. Its just like the open road. This is perhaps the biggest challenge for this initiative to securely route calls or any other traffic over SIP networks. I wouldn't be surprised to see if a identification method is implemented to authorise users and authenticate them before they send any traffic via this network.

2) Acceptance by Industry as Standard VOIP Protocol: This would be interesting to see how VOIP industry looks at this protocol. Its very important that industry accepts this protocol and start implementing it in real life solution rather than just sitting in the research labs as experimental VOIP protocol. Afterall open source is the way to go :-)

While researching further, I found an excellent Writeup by David A. Bryan and Bruce B. Lowekamp of College of William and Mary on SOSIMPLE-P2P SIP Communication System. This white paper should give an idea about whats in store for Peer to Peer based SIP VOIP services.

We strongly believe that p2p based SIP can change the way we look at VOIP today. It will not only bring more users to this ever evolving technology. It will actually make foray into more household via more open source & secure networks. We will keep a watch on the development of this new VOIP protocol and update whenever necessary.