20 July 2010

Burst traffic smoothing for SIP processing elements

I received another patent grant from my IBM days. This time its United States Patent 7,742,417:

Mechanisms for burst traffic smoothing for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) processing elements are provided. A dispatch queue management engine determines whether a received packet is a TCP or UDP packet. If the packet is a TCP packet, the packet is automatically added to the dispatch queue. If the packet is a UDP packet, a value for a drop function f is generated and a random or pseudo-random number r is generated. If r has a predetermined relationship to f, then the UDP packet is added to the dispatch queue, otherwise the UDP packet is discarded. The value for f is based on the current dispatch queue load, the network quality, the retransmission rate, and the allowable drop rate. Thus, the determination as to whether to drop UDP packets or not is configurable by an administrator and also adaptable to the current network and dispatch queue conditions.

The idea for this patent came from dealing with overflowing UDP buffers during a SIP-enabled Java application server stress test. We observed that garbage collection events would pause the application server and cause a backlog of SIP retransmissions over UDP to grow. The invention is a way to selectively toss out UDP packets during such a retransmission burst in a way that would allow the application server to catch up again while maintaining a probabilistically high QoS.

No comments:

Subscribe Subscribe to The Return of Agent Zlerich