How-To use the sdp negotiator.
[The GNU oSIP stack]

Description.

The SDP offer/answer model is where most SIP interoperability issue comes from. The SDP specification (rfc2327.txt) is often not fully respected. As an example, most SIP applications forget to add the mandatory 's' field in the SDP packet. Another mistake is to assume that an SDP packet don't need a 'p' and a 'e' field. Even if they are both optional, at least of those is mandatory! I have never seen ONE implementation that send at least one 'p' or 'e' field!! For all those reasons, the negotiation happens to be a hard task

osip_negotiation.h VS osip_rfc3264.h

The include file osip_negotiation.h and osip_rfc3264.h both offer the same feature. osip_negotiation.h is now made obsolete as the result were poor. PLEASE DON'T USE IT ANYMORE

The new negotiator is more promising and nearly finished. You can already use and test it, but be aware that this is still work in progress and even the API has not yet been fixed.

Do you need to use a SDP negotiator?

Of course, a SDP negotiator is only needed for SIP endpoint.

Advanced applications may find it inappropriate, but as you can modify the SDP answer after running the negotiation, I see no reason why you should not use it. It will just simplify the amount of code you'll need to negotiate medias.

If by using the new negotiator, you find some nice ideas to improve it, I'll be glad to think about implementing them. Trying to build a generic SDP negotiatior gave me headache... I hope the new one will be suitable for all needs.

How-to initialize the SDP negotiator?

Here is the way to initialize the new negotiator:

	struct osip_rfc3264 *cnf;
	int i;

	i = osip_rfc3264_init(&cnf);
	if (i!=0)
	{
		fprintf(stderr, "Cannot Initialize Negotiator feature.\n");
		return -1;
	}

How-to add support for medias?

You then must add a set of known codecs. To simplify the implementation, you add sdp_media_t elements. The next code shows how you can add support for the G729 codec.

	sdp_media_t *med;
	sdp_attribute_t *attr;
	i = sdp_media_init(&med);
	med->m_proto = osip_strdup("RTP/AVP");
	med->m_media = osip_strdup("audio");
	osip_list_add(med->m_payloads, osip_strdup("18"), -1);

	i = sdp_attribute_init (&attr);
	attr->a_att_field = osip_strdup("rtpmap");
	attr->a_att_value = osip_strdup("G729/8000");
	osip_list_add (med->a_attributes, attr, -1);

	osip_rfc3264_add_audio_media(cnf, med, -1);

How-to execute the negotiation?

Running the negotiator is still a complex sequence of calls. This is because I have oriented developments to make the negotiator enough flexible for all situations. This makes the negotiator quite complex to use but I hope you'll still find it enough powerfull.

The test program is located in the source files of libosip2 in src/test/torture_rfc3262.c. You'll find a complete negotiation process to build an answer to an offer.

When the negotiation is finished for all media lines, you still MUST modify some elements missing in the SDP message. Especially, you must replace the IP addresses and port numbers to reflect your configuration.

Note that at the end of the negotiation process, you can still modify the SDP message to make it closer to your own media capabilities. For example, you can add attributes such as "ptime" options for audio and video payloads.

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