Design, implementation, and performance of a load balancer for SIP server clusters

Abstract—This paper introduces several novel load-balancing algorithms for distributing Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) re-quests to a cluster of SIP servers. Our load balancer improves both throughput and response time versus a single node while ex-posing a single interface to external clients. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of our system using a cluster of Intel x86 machines running Linux. We compare our algorithms to several well-known approaches and present scalability results for up to 10 nodes. Our best algorithm, Transaction Least-Work-Left (TLWL), achieves its performance by integrating several features: knowledge of the SIP protocol, dynamic estimates of back-end server load, distinguishing transactions from calls, recognizing variability in call length, and exploiting differences in processing costs for different SIP transactions. By combining these features, our algorithm provides finer-grained load balancing than stan-dard approaches, resulting in throughput improvements of up to 24 % and response-time improvements of up to two orders of magnitude. We present a detailed analysis of occupancy to show how our algorithms significantly reduce response time. Index Terms—Dispatcher, load balancing, performance, server, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). I