Infrastructure

SIP Thor platform

SIP Thor platform diagram

SIP Thor is a turnkey platform for delivering real-time Audio, Video, Chat, File Transfer and Presence services based on SIP and related protocols. It is built on IETF standards using reliable open-source components, and can be physically distributed across multiple data centres through a state-of-the-art self-organising network design.

The platform has been in production use for many years, with an excellent track record.

Self-organising technology

SIP Thor was developed in 2005, and its design followed the same principles that helped scale up public services such as Google MapReduce, Amazon Dynamo and Skype supernodes.

SIP Thor is based on P2PSIP, a set of technologies that combines existing IETF standards such as SIP and DNS with peer-to-peer techniques like distributed hash tables (DHT). This combination delivers scalability unmatched by traditional clustering or load-balancer models, while dramatically reducing operational costs.

SIP Thor implements an overlay network for SIP Proxy/Registrar and other network-centric functions such as DNS, presence agent, database storage, voicemail, XCAP policy and provisioning. The P2P layer provides the primitives for self-organisation, routing and resource lookups; the self-organising property keeps operational costs to a minimum by removing the need for the monitoring and maintenance activities that traditional infrastructures require.

High availability

SIP Thor is designed to automatically recover from disasters such as network connectivity loss, server failures or denial-of-service attacks. On node failure, all requests handled by the faulty node are automatically distributed to surviving nodes without any human intervention. When the failed node becomes available again, it takes back its place in the network without manual interaction.

Scalability

Traditional technology duplicates functionality and wastes resources by using expensive and inefficient hot/stand-by clusters. SIP Thor uses all available servers in active mode to their maximum capacity, so there is no need for expensive hardware or stand-by machines to achieve high availability across geographic sites. Capacity is increased simply by adding extra nodes — installing the standard software package is enough for a new node to take its place in the network without any manual configuration.

A detailed architecture description is available in the SIP Thor documentation.

Features

  • Signaling (SIP protocol)
  • Audio and video (RTP media)
  • PSTN telephony (Class 4 and 5)
  • DNS management including ENUM
  • Chat and file transfers (MSRP media)
  • Presence (SIP SIMPLE)
  • Remote provisioning (SOAP/XML)
  • CDR accounting (Postpaid and prepaid)
  • Collaboration (multi-party conferencing)
  • Multi-domain and multi-tenant
  • MS Teams multi-tenant compatible

Components

For Web, desktop and mobile clients fully integrated with the SIP Thor platform, see Sylk Suite.

You can also download the full platform description (PDF), review the Terms and Conditions, or visit the Purchasing page.

SIP2SIP service

SIP2SIP is the longest-standing multimedia real-time communications service based on the SIP protocol, in operation since 2005. Built on the SIP Thor platform, the service uses SIP, WebRTC and related protocols, is free to use under a fair-use policy, and federates with other publicly reachable SIP and XMPP domains.

You can register a free SIP address and federate with any other publicly reachable SIP server.

Features

  • SIP and Web addresses

  • SIP to XMPP gateway

  • SIP to WebRTC gateway

  • Multi-party conferencing

If you wish to try the SIP Thor platform features in production, you can sign up for the free service at http://sip2sip.info.