Sip Overload Control Testbed: Design, Building and Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper presents a window-based overload control mechanism for SIP servers, implemented on an open-source platform, which maintains maximum throughput during overload without requiring explicit feedback.

Contribution

It introduces a novel overload control method for SIP servers that operates without explicit feedback and is validated through real-world implementation.

Findings

Maintains server throughput at maximum capacity under overload

First real-platform implementation of a feedback-free overload control for SIP

Effective in preventing server overload and ensuring stability

Abstract

Having facilities such as being in text form, end-to-end connection establishment, and being independence from the type of transmitted data, SIP protocol is a good choice for signaling protocol in order to set up a connection between two users of an IP network. Although utilization of SIP protocol in a wide range of applications has made various vulnerabilities in this protocol, amongst which overload could make serious problems in SIP servers. A SIP is overloaded when it does not have sufficient resources (majorly CPU processing power and memory) to process all messages. In this paper the window-based overload control mechanism which does not require explicit feedback is developed and implemented on Asterisk open source proxy and evaluated. The results of implementation show that this method could practically maintain throughput in case of overload. As we know this is the only overload control method which is implemented on a real platform without using explicit feedback. The results show that the under load server maintains its throughput at the maximum capacity.