From: "Bill Lo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   Can someone direct me to a document that clearly outlines the
   differences between a SIP Proxy and a B2BUA.  While RFC 3261
   outlines a proxy, the B2BUA is still a bit vague.  How and why
   would I use a B2BUA?

The rules for proxies are set out in RFC 3261.  Or as I would say, you
can be a proxy if you can make it look like you're following the rules
in RFC 3261, which somewhat enlarges what the agent can do.

My personal opinion is that since "back-to-back user agent" is a
phrase made up of words with set meanings, the meaning of the phrase
is fixed:  a device which consists of two SIP user agents which
communicate with each other strictly at the application level.  That
is, none of the protocol details on one side are visible on the other,
only actions that would be visible in a real user interface of a SIP
UA.  In particular, the SIP features that could be used when talking
SIP to one side of the device do not depend on those features being
implemented by the SIP UA talking to the other side of the device.

In practice, people use the term B2BUA to describe any SIP transducing
agent which violates the rules for proxies.  Often it intercepts media
traffic and sometimes transcodes it.  SIP requests on one side are
rarely actually terminated at the B2BUA, but are heavily edited and
passed through to the other side to be implemented.  Usually such
devices aren't very extensible, and can only support SIP oerations
that were taken into account when the device was designed.

Dale
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