Session Description Protocol

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What Does Session Description Protocol Mean?

Session Description Protocol (SDP) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard applied to streaming media. It uses various tags to describe multimedia communications.

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Techopedia Explains Session Description Protocol

One of the elements that SDP uses is called UTF-8 which helps to detail the use of characters in machine language.

SDP helps to specify the broadcast methods along with the format and time definition of the session. SDP applies to session announcement, session invitation and different aspects of session initiation for multimedia sessions. The IETF describes SDP as general protocol applied to sets of multimedia senders and receivers.

Much of the technique for this type of conferencing involves multicasting, and SDP helps to provide consistent standards and guidelines to these types of technology uses.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.