Design, implementation and performance evaluation of a proactive overload control mechanism for networks of SIP servers

Abstract

The extent and diversity of systems, provided by IP networks, have made various technologies approach integrating different types of access networks and convert to the next generation network (NGN). The session initiation protocol (SIP) with respect to facilities such as being in text form, end-to-end connection, independence from the type of transmitted data, and support various forms of transmission, is an appropriate choice for signalling protocol in order to make connection between two IP network users. These advantages have made SIP be considered as a signalling protocol in IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), a proposed signalling platform for NGNs. Despite having all these advantages, SIP protocol lacks appropriate mechanism for addressing overload causing serious problems for SIP servers. SIP overload occurs when a SIP server does not have enough resources to process messages. The fact is that the performance of SIP servers is largely degraded during overload periods because of the retransmission mechanism of SIP. In this paper, we propose an advanced mechanism, which is an improved method of the windows based overload control in RFC 6357. In the windows based overload control method, the window is used to limit the amount of message generated by SIP proxy server. A distributed adaptive window-based overload control algorithm, which does not use explicit feedback from the downstream server, is proposed. The number of confirmation messages is used as a measure of the downstream server load. Thus, the proposed algorithm does not impose any additional complexity or processing on the downstream server, which is overloaded, making it a robust approach. Our proposed algorithm is developed and implemented based on an open source proxy. The results of evaluation show that proposed method could maintain the throughput close to the theoretical throughput, practically and fairly. As we know, this is the only SIP overload control mechanism, which is implemented on a real platform without using explicit feedback.