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SIP does not provide services SIP can locate a user and deliver an opaque object to his current location. If this primitive is used to deliver a session description written in SDP, for instance, the endpoints can agree on the parameters of a session. If the same primitive is used to deliver a photo of the caller as well as the session description, a "caller ID" service can be easily implemented. As this example shows, a single primitive is typically used to provide several different services.

SIP does not offer conference control services such as floor control or voting and does not prescribe how a conference is to be managed. SIP can be used to initiate a session that uses some other conference control protocol. Since SIP messages and the sessions they establish can pass through entirely different networks, SIP cannot, and does not, provide any kind of network resource reservation capabilities.

Request: A SIP message sent from a client to a server, for the purpose of invoking a particular operation. Response: A SIP message sent from a server to a client, for indicating the status of a request sent from the client to the server.

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Stateful Proxy: A logical entity that maintains the client and server transaction state machines defined by this specification during the processing of a request, also known as a transaction stateful proxy Stateless Proxy: A logical entity that does not maintain the client or server transaction state machines defined in this specification when it processes requests

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The To header field first and foremost specifies the desired "logical" recipient of the request, or the address-of-record of the user or resource that is the target of this request. The To header field allows for a display name. The From header field indicates the logical identity of the initiator of the request, possibly the user's address-of-record. Like the To header field, it contains a URI and optionally a display name. The From header field allows for a display name. A UAC SHOULD use the display name "Anonymous", along with a syntactically correct, but otherwise meaningless URI (like sip:thisis@anonymous.invalid), if the identity of the client is to remain hidden.

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The CSeq header field serves as a way to identify and order transactions. It consists of a sequence number and a method. The method MUST match that of the request. The Call-ID header field acts as a unique identifier to group together a series of messages. All SIP UAs must have a means to guarantee that the Call-ID header fields they produce will not be inadvertently generated by any other UA. Use of cryptographically random identifiers (RFC 1750 ) in the generation of Call-IDs is RECOMMENDED.

The Max-Forwards header field serves to limit the number of hops a request can transit on the way to its destination. It consists of an integer that is decremented by one at each hop. If the Max-Forwards value reaches 0 before the request reaches its destination, it will be rejected with a 483(Too Many Hops) error response.
The Via header field indicates the transport used for the transaction and identifies the location where the response is to be sent. When the UAC creates a request, it MUST insert a Via into that request. The protocol name and protocol version in the header field MUST be SIP and 2.0, respectively. The Via header field value MUST contain a branch parameter. This parameter is used to identify the transaction created by that request. This parameter is used by both the client and the server. The branch ID inserted by an element compliant with this specification MUST always begin with the characters "z9hG4bK". These 7 characters are used as a magic cookie (7 is deemed sufficient to ensure that an older RFC 2543 implementation would not pick such a value)

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