Service performance analysis on SIP powered multimedia networks

Abstract

2 IAbstrmt-Internet telephony has evolved to infer a range of different services, In general, it refers to the transport of real-time mediasuch as voice and videoover the Internet to provide interactive communications services among Internet users. Supporting Internet telephony services requires a variety of components transport, Quality of Service (QoS), authentication, authorization, accounting, gateway discovery, directory service, and signaling 111. Two protocols have emerged initially to provide these functions, H.323 series of recommendations by ITU-T, and Session Initiation Protocol {SZP) by IETF Multi-Party Multimedia Session Control Working Group [2].SIP is a call processing protocol. The service estabbhed by session may be multimedia conference, or point-point telephone call. SIP is not dependent upon any particuIar conference control protocoi, such as H32.3, and it does not define any method of transporting the session tratfc. All the major SIP traffics, management and services will be handled by SLP PROXY, REDIKECT and REGESTRAR servers. The servers play very important roles in the SIP network. The resources for sewem might become a bottleneck for the SIP network, dthough the SIP is Lightweight for being a signding protocol and companies and organizations have just developed some SIP related services, it still has many virgin lands to be dig out. But before an SIP powered network service is planned and implemented, one major concern the SIP service providers care the most, is bow good (or bad) the service performance is going to be under various circumstance. In other words, they are trying to get more understanding about the network performance impacts as a whole, when certain type of traffic surge due to a particular event for instance, or when a portion of route gets blocked due to a network probIem, etc.This paper proposes to establish B simple web-based service performance tool that simulates selected normal and abnormal operations of an SIP powered network. Based on thi s tool, a variety of multimedia service traflic is supported. The tool is used to analyze the service performance of respective network elements in a simulated SIP environment, where traffic of different service types and management procedures is generated under different network configurations and scenario setups. The analytical study supports one service types initially: VOW (Voice over Internet Protocol), and will be extended to study other service types such as voice-band data call and fax. The user can input the desired service types, traffic volumes and distributions, and configure the service proceeding scenario interactively through the friendly input format from any client.The service performance study under this simulated network is especially useful to the service providers who are currently offering Internet-based services or have been planning new services aggressively. Service impacts due to resource bottleneck will be noticed by active operators so improvement or enhancement c m be implemented in time before proble...