OpenSIP: Toward Software-Defined SIP Networking

TL;DR

OpenSIP integrates SDN and NFV with deep packet inspection to enhance SIP routing, management, and load balancing, addressing traditional limitations in VoIP networks with a scalable, cost-effective solution.

Contribution

This paper introduces OpenSIP, a novel framework combining SDN, NFV, and DPI to improve SIP network efficiency and management, which was not addressed in prior work.

Findings

Low overhead and satisfactory performance on testbed

Effective load balancing and resource management

Scalable architecture for SIP networks

Abstract

VoIP is becoming a low-priced and efficient replacement for PSTN in communication industries. With a widely growing adoption rate, SIP is an application layer signaling protocol, standardized by the IETF, for creating, modifying, and terminating VoIP sessions. Generally speaking, SIP routes a call request to its destination by using SIP proxies. With the increasing use of SIP, traditional configurations pose certain drawbacks, such as ineffective routing, un-optimized management of proxy resources (including CPU and memory), and overload conditions. This paper presents OpenSIP to upgrade the SIP network framework with emerging technologies, such as SDN and NFV. SDN provides for management that decouples the data and control planes along with a software-based centralized control that results in effective routing and resource management. Moreover, NFV assists SDN by virtualizing various network devices and functions. However, current SDN elements limit the inspected fields to layer 2-4 headers, whereas SIP routing information resides in the layer-7 header. A benefit of OpenSIP is that it enforces policies on SIP networking that are agnostic to higher layers with the aid of a Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine. Among the benefits of OpenSIP is programmability, cost reduction, unified management, routing, as well as efficient load balancing. The present study implements OpenSIP on a real testbed which includes Open vSwitch and the Floodlight controller. The results show that the proposed architecture has a low overhead and satisfactory performance and, in addition, can take advantage of a flexible scale-out design during application deployment.