0118 Registrations2

There are many ways by which the contents of the location service can

   be established.  One way is administratively.  In the above example,

   Bob is known to be a member of the engineering department through

   access to a corporate database.  However, SIP provides a mechanism

   for a UA to create a binding explicitly.  This mechanism is known as

   registration.

 

   Registration entails sending a REGISTER request to a special type of

   UAS known as a registrar.  A registrar acts as the front end to the

   location service for a domain, reading and writing mappings based on

   the contents of REGISTER requests.  This location service is then

   typically consulted by a proxy server that is responsible for routing

   requests for that domain.

 

   An illustration of the overall registration process is given in

   Figure 2.  Note that the registrar and proxy server are logical roles

   that can be played by a single device in a network; for purposes of

clarity the two are separated in this illustration.  Also note that

   UAs may send requests through a proxy server in order to reach a

   registrar if the two are separate elements.

 

   SIP does not mandate a particular mechanism for implementing the

   location service.  The only requirement is that a registrar for some

   domain MUST be able to read and write data to the location service,

   and a proxy or a redirect server for that domain MUST be capable of

   reading that same data.  A registrar MAY be co-located with a

   particular SIP proxy server for the same domain.