Overload Control in SIP Networks: A Heuristic Approach Based on Mathematical Optimization

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control protocol for creating, modifying and terminating multimedia sessions. An open issue is the control of overload that occurs when a SIP server lacks sufficient CPU and memory resources to process all messages. We prove that the problem of overload control in SIP network with a set of n servers and limited resources is in the form of NP-hard. This paper proposes a Load-Balanced Call Admission Controller (LB-CAC), based on a heuristic mathematical model to determine an optimal resource allocation in such a way that maximizes call admission rates regarding the limited resources of the SIP servers. LB-CAC determines the optimal "call admission rates" and "signaling paths" for admitted calls along optimal allocation of CPU and memory resources of the SIP servers through a new linear programming model. This happens by acquiring some critical information of SIP servers. An assessment of the numerical and experimental results demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed method.