A Study of Bare PC SIP Server Performance

In bare computing, applications run directly on an ordinary PC without using an operating system (OS). Advantages of bare PC computing include elimination of overhead due to the OS, and immunity against attacks targeting OS vulnerabilities. We evaluate the performance of a bare PC SIP server by determining its throughput and latency in a dedicated test network using the open source SIPp workload generator to generate requests for registration (register, register update, and register logout operations), proxying (invite and invite-not-found operations) and redirection (invite redirect operation) with and without authentication. We also report internal timings for the server. The performance of the server is then compared with the OpenSER and Brekeke SIP servers running on Linux and Windows respectively. Our results show that the bare PC SIP server has low cost for internal SIP-related operations, higher throughput than the Windows server, and higher or equal throughput than the Linux server except in the case of redirection. Its latency is more than that of an OS-based server only in the case of invite with authentication and invite-not-found without authentication.