A Fast Failure Detection and Failover Scheme for SIP High Availability Networks

The SIP proxy server, which is an important building block of a SIP network, can be in a form of a cluster to prevent service unavailability caused by software or hardware failures. The design of a SIP proxy server cluster with a single dispatcher in a SIP network faces the single-point-offailure problem. The use of dual SIP dispatcher architecture was proposed and VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol) was used as an IP failover mechanism. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a dependable SIP network that includes n + k SIP dispatchers (n active dispatchers + k backup dispatchers) to control and monitor a cluster ofm SIP proxy servers for VoIP and video conferencing applications. A fast failure detection and failover (FFF) scheme has also been proposed. FFF uses OpenAIS as a high availability middleware to perform health check and failover of dispatchers and proxy servers. Experimental results have shown that the FFF scheme reduces the dispatcher failover time by 80 % compared to the VRRP mechanism and also shorten the proxy failover time by 85 % compared to the mechanism provided by OpenSER itself.