The subscriber endpoint starts sending a REGISTER request, which gets challenged by a 401. After calculating the response of the authentication challenge, it sends the REGISTER again, including the authentication response. The SIP proxy looks up the credentials of the subscriber in the database,does the same calculation, and if the result matches the one from the subscriber, the registration is granted.
The SIP proxy writes the content of the Contact header (e.g. sip:me@1.2.3.4:1234;transport=UDP)
into its location table (in case of NAT the content is changed by the SIP load-balancer to the
IP/port from where the request was received), so it knows where to reach a subscriber in case
on an inbound call to this subscriber (e.g. sip:someuser@example.org is mapped to
sip:me@1.2.3.4:1234;transport=UDP and sent out to this address).
If NAT is detected, the SIP proxy sends a OPTIONS message to the registered contact every 30 seconds, in order to keep the NAT binding on the NAT device open. Otherwise, for subsequent calls to this contact, Sipwise C5 wouldn’t be able to reach the endpoint behind NAT (NAT devices usually drop a UDP binding after not receiving any traffic for ~30-60 seconds).
By default, a subscriber can register 5 contacts for an Address of Record (AoR, e.g. sip:someuser@example.org).