Towards effective SIP load Balancing

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) high availability, reliability and redundancy are determined by the ability of the core SIP network components to offer high quality SIP services in the event(s) of high call transactions, link outages, device failures, misconfigurations and security attacks. In this context, load balancers can be used to achieve redundancy and active load balancing of SIP transactions. In load balancing schemes, new requests are allocated across available servers using a selection algorithm. Although considerable work has been already done for Web traffic balancing, little research effort is primarily aiming to SIP load balancing. This paper proposes a SIP dedicated load balancing solution, which is currently under development within the EC funded project SNOCER. We describe in detail our balancing scheme, its associated architecture elements and provide implementation details showing that it is simple to realize, effective, flexible, robust and secure