The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signalling protocol, widely used for setting up and tearing down multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over the Internet. Other feasible application examples include video conferencing, streaming multimedia distribution, instant messaging, presence information and online games. In November 2000, SIP was accepted as a 3GPP signaling protocol and permanent element of the IMS architecture for IP based streaming multimedia services in cellular systems.

The protocol can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party (unicast) or multiparty (multicast) sessions consisting of one or several media streams. The modification can involve changing addresses or ports, inviting more participants, adding or deleting media streams, etc.

The SIP protocol is situated at the session layer in the OSI model, and at the application layer in the TCP/IP model. SIP is designed to be independent of the underlying transport layer; it can run on TCP, UDP, or SCTP.

SIP has the following characteristics:

Transport-independent, because SIP can be used with UDP, TCP, SCTP, etc. Text-based, allowing for humans to read and analyze SIP messages.