Tuning SCTP failover for carrier grade telephony signaling

Abstract

The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) has not only been selected as the signaling transport protocol of choice in IETF SIGTRAN, the architecture that bridges circuit-switched and IP-based mobile core networks, but also plays a pivotal role in SAE/LTE, the next-generation UMTS/HSPA networks. To meet the redundancy requirements of telecom signaling traffic, SCTP includes a failover mechanism that enables rerouting of traffic from an unreachable network path to a backup path. However, the recommendations provided by IETF on how to configure the SCTP failover mechanism to meet telecom signaling requirements are kept quite general and leave much of the tuning to the telecom equipment vendor and/or operator. Several works by us and others have been carried out to study the effect of different SCTP parameters on the failover performance. The main contribution of this paper is that it gives a coherent treatment of how to configure the SCTP failover mechanism for carrier-grade telephony signaling, and provides practically usable configuration recommendations. The paper also discusses an alternate or complementary way of optimizing the SCTP failover mechanism by relaxing the exponential backoff that foregoes a retransmission timeout in SCTP. Some results showing significantly reduced failover times by use of this mechanism, with only marginal deteriorating effects on a signaling network, are discussed and analyzed in the paper.