Segregating Signaling and Media Planes into Different containers

Abstract

Scalability is an important aspect of communication networks. With the ascent of SIP and associated modern real-time protocols, IP telephony has become a revolutionary technology in connecting users through real-time voice communications with enabled video and instant messaging capabilities. B2BUA is a SIP server that provides call management and authentication functionality by reformulating the request and routing the traffic to other user agents in the network. It comprises signaling and media entities that handle all control signaling messages and real-time data(media) information respectively. The signaling and entities run as different processes in the same container. Such an architecture encounters a large CPU utilization after a specific number of maximum calls due to increase traffic flowing within the same node. Further Packet processing is CPU intensive and there is a need for an architecture that scales well with increasing traffic without hitting the CPU performance. The paper presents the design of decoupled architecture for Signaling and Media entities by running both the processes in different containers. With such an approach, one Signaling entity can communicate with multiple Media entities or vice versa thereby providing a suitable scalable solution to deal with the increased traffic and further maintaining the system efficiency. The paper is concluded by highlighting the difference between Kubernetes and OpenStack for the proposed architecture