New Version of “Design Considerations for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Overload Control”
The IETF this week released an important new draft titled “Design Considerations for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Overload Control” that is available at:
The importance here is that it is a fact of life that SIP-based communication servers can get “overloaded” with messages and not be able to respond to all incoming SIP messages. A SIP server could be overloaded by situations such as:
- too many users wanting to make simultaneous calls (think of the extreme case of a crisis situation)
- a failure of upstream connectivity that limits the capacity of the SIP server
- some other program on the server itself that consumes so much CPU and other resources that the SIP application can’t operate efficiently
- some SIP endpoint(s) that are spewing bogus messages at the server.
- an attacker executing a Denial-of-Service attack
Regardless of the mechanism, SIP servers need to be able to gracefully handle an overload.
The IETF has in fact spun up a Working Group – SIP Overload Control (SOC) – focused on this exact problem and chartered to come up with mechanisms to cope with SIP overload
This Internet-Draft on overload design considerations is one of the documents of this group and is well worth a read, as it explores the various mechanisms that can be used to combat overload.
Incidentally, if you’d like to join in the SOC discussions, or even just monitor what is being discussed, the working group operates a public mailing list at:
Overload is definitely a potential issue within SIP networks and it’s good to see this group working on the issue.
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