Queueing Strategies for Local Overload Control in SIP Server

As other signaling protocols in the past, also SIP suffers of server overload leading to performance collapse. In this framework, recent Internet drafts propose the improvements of overload control mechanisms already presented in SIP and/or a closed loop system model for overload avoidance. In this framework, the paper presents the system simulator developed extending the Network Simulator (ns-2) with logical for local overload control. Furthermore, the paper proposes a new queueing discipline obtained combining the simple First In First Out (FIFO) service discipline with the priority one. Then the paper presents a simulation analysis, aimed at evaluating the impact on system performance of different queueing structures, service disciplines, and buffer sizes. Simulation results clearly show that the proposed queueing discipline produces good system performance with a low complexity increase. Finally, the simulation results point out the weakness of the 503 Service Unavailable message mechanism, which does not introduce significant improvement when combined with the proposed solution.