What are SIP methods / Requests and responses?

SIP uses Methods / Requests and corresponding Responses to communicate and establish a call session.

SIP requests

There are fourteen SIP Request methods of which the first six are the most basic request / method types:

• INVITE = Establishes a session.

• ACK = Confirms an INVITE request.

• BYE = Ends a session.

• CANCEL = Cancels establishing of a session.

• REGISTER = Communicates user location (host name, IP).

• OPTIONS = Communicates information about the capabilities of the calling and receiving SIP phones.

• PRACK = Provisional Acknowledgement.

• SUBSCRIBE = Subscribes for Notification from the notifier.

• NOTIFY = Notifies the subscriber of a new event.

• PUBLISH = Publishes an event to the Server.

• INFO = Sends mid session information.

• REFER = Asks the recipient to issue call transfer.

• MESSAGE = Transports Instant Messages.

• UPDATE = Modifies the state of a session.

SIP responses

SIP Requests are answered with SIP responses, of which there are six classes:

• 1xx = Informational responses, such as 180 (ringing).

• 2xx = Success responses.

• 3xx = Redirection responses.

• 4XX = Request failures.

• 5xx = Server errors.

• 6xx = Global failures.

Further reading

• SIP call session between 2 phones

• Can you list all known SIP responses?

• What is SIP?