Load Balancing Algorithms for the Session Initiation Protocol

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 integrating these attributes, our algorithm provides finer-grained load balancing than standard approaches, resulting in throughput improvements of up to 24 percent and response times improvements of up to two orders of magnitude. We present a detailed analysis of how our algorithms significantly reduce response time.