Load Balancing for SIP Server Clusters

• Main Authors: Jiang, H., Iyengar, A., Nahum, E., Segmuller, W., Tantawi, A., Wright, C. P.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Clustering algorithms; Communications Society; Costs; Delay; Large-scale systems; Load management; Peer to peer computing; Protocols; Throughput; Web server
• ISSN: 0743-166X; 2641-9874
• DOI: 10.1109/INFCOM.2009.5062154

This paper introduces several novel load balancing algorithms for distributing session initiation protocol (SIP) requests to a cluster of SIP servers. Our load balancer improves both throughput and response time versus a single node, while exposing 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 with 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 standard approaches, resulting in throughput improvements of up to 24 percent 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.