Strict Prioritization of New Requests over Retransmissions for Enhancing Scalability of SIP Servers

Abstract

As the quantity of mobile application traffic keeps increasing, operators are facing the scalability limits of VoIP protocols. Higher queuing delays at the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) server create significantly more retransmissions in the network. When the message arrival rate including retransmissions exceeds the message serving capacity of a SIP server, the queue size increases and eventually the SIP server can crash. Our analysis demonstrates that server crash can be prevented if the buffer size of the SIP server is limited. However, having smaller buffer sizes yields side effects such as lower successful transaction ratio for bursty traffic. In this paper, we propose a new SIP server scheduling mechanism in which the original incoming SIP requests have strict priority over the re-transmitted requests. The priority based scheduling mechanism provides network administrator with the ability to configure the buffer size of a SIP server to a moderately high value. We implement the proposed priority-based scheduling mechanism in the JAIN-SIP stack and confirm that the implementation requires minimal changes to the SIP standard. Numerical experiments show that the proposed scheduling mechanism provides significantly and consistently better scalability at high buffer sizes compared to the heavily used first-in-first-out scheduling, thus enabling us to avoid server overloads.