Network Application Programming Interface over Session Initiation Protocol, a novel approach to the global roaming environment

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the most favorable candidate as the mobility management protocol in mobile computing. However, both the application and its developer suffer from inconveniences in utilizing SIP due to lack of a universal interface of SIP. In this paper, the Network Application Programming Interface over Session Initiation Protocol (NAPISIP) is proposed to facilitate using SIP in applications. The NAPISIP has the advantages of supporting concurrent mobility, avoiding application modification, saving application developers from burdens of learning to use SIP, and freeing operating systems from requirements of supporting sophisticated services or Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to get communication handoff information. The NAPISIP is implemented on Windows 2000 and given experiments. In the experiments with legacy computers, the NAPISIP not only shows a promising performance but also has no drawbacks in Mobile IP when mobile hosts roam through networks.