A new scheme to reduce session establishment time in session initiation protocol (SIP)

Abstract

The session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has been developed by Internet Engineering Taskforce standard (IETF) with the main purpose of establishing and managing sessions between two or more parties wishing to communicate. SIP is a signaling protocol which is used for the current and future Internet Protocol (IP) telephony services, video services, and integrated web and multimedia services. SIP is an application layer protcol, thus it can run over Transmission Control Protocol(TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP). When the packets are sent over the network, a form of congestion control mechanism is necessary to prevent from network collapse. TCP is a reliable protocl and provides the congestion control by adjusting the size of the congestion windows. UDP is an unreliable protocol and no flow control mechanism is provided. Many applications of the Internet require the establishment and management of sessions. The purpose of the thesis is to study the session establishnment procedure in SIP and try to reduce the time taken for the session setup in two different conditions. One, when there is no congestion in the network, and the other is when there is a network congestion. We have simulated the behaviour of session establishment in SIP using Network Simulator (NS2). UDP is used as the transport protocol. We have created different network topologies. In the topology we had created SIP user agents who wants to communicte, proxy servers for forwarding the requests on behalf of the user agents, and a Domain Name Server (DNS) which maintains the location information of all proxy servers. We tried to reduce the time taken for the session establishment. As UDP does not provide any congestion control mechanisms, we used the binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm to set the timers. In our network topolgy when there is no packet loss in the network, the time taken for the session establishment is reduced from 0.86 sec to 0.574 sec. In case of network congestion the setup time is reduced from 4.55 sec to 2.86 sec. From the simulation, we conclude that the session establishment time can be reduced by reducing the number of message exchanges required for session setup.