Now in its fourth edition, the ground-breaking Artech House bestseller SIP: Understanding the Session Initiation Protocol offers you the most comprehensive and current understanding of this revolutionary protocol for call signaling and IP Telephony. The fourth edition incorporates changes in SIP from the last five years with new chapters on internet threats and attacks, WebRTC and SIP, and substantial updates throughout. This cutting-edge book shows how SIP provides a highly-scalable and cost-effective way to offer new and exciting telecommunication feature sets, helping practitioners design "e;next generation"e; network and develop new applications and software stacks. Other key discussions include SIP as a key component in the Internet multimedia conferencing architecture, request and response messages, devices in a typical network, types of servers, SIP headers, comparisons with existing signaling protocols including H.323, related protocols SDP (Session Description Protocol) and RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol), and the future direction of SIP.