Hysteretic control technique for overload problem solution in network of SIP servers

This paper contains research and development results concerning application of hysteretic control principles to solve SIP servers overload problem, which is known from a number of IETF standards and scientific papers published over the past few years. The problem is that SIP protocol, being the application layer protocol, by default has no build-in means of overload control, as, for example, SS7, MTP2 and MTP3 protocols. It was the SS7 network, where a threshold mechanism of hysteretic signaling load control was first implemented. In this paper we describe the main up-to-date solutions of an overload control problem in a signaling network, and develop analytical models of hysteretic control, which are useful in the development of load management functions of SIP servers. We also propose the design of Open SIP signaling Node (OSN) software architecture which is intended to be used for simulations and comparison of various overload control mechanisms.