Master Thesis - Past Projects - Abstract

Load balancing of IP telephony

ID: LIU-IDA/LITH-EX-A--08/051--SE

In today's world, more and more phone calls are made over IP. This results in an increasing demand for scalable IP telephony equipment. Ingate Systems AB produces firewalls specialized in handling IP telephony. They have an inherent limit in the number of concurrent phone calls that they can handle. This can be a bottleneck at high loads. There is a load balancing solution available in the platform, but it has a number of drawbacks, such as media latency and client capability requirements, limiting its usage. Many companies provide load balancing solutions for SIP. However, it appears few handle all the problematic scenarios that the Ingate firewall does. This master's thesis aims to add load balancing functionality to the Ingate firewall, so that it can handle all types of clients. By splitting the firewall into two completely separate layers - a SIP layer and a firewall layer - the concept of a virtual machine emerges. A machine is no longer restricted to its physical SIP and firewall layers. Instead, virtual machines are used to process calls. They still have SIP and firewall layers, but the layers can reside on different physical machines. This thesis demonstrates the operation of an innovative load balancing implementation. The implementation was evaluated, and using four machines the test setup performed 50% better than the original Ingate platform, while still retaining all functionality - something that was not possible with the original platform. This surpassed both the company's and my own expectations.

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Author(s): David Montag

Contact: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani