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Measurements of SIP signaling over 802.11b links

Published: 02 September 2005 Publication History

Abstract

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a popular application-level signaling protocol that is used for a wide variety of applications such as session control and mobility handling. In some of these applications, the exchange of SIP messages is time-critical, for instance when SIP is used to handle mobility for voice over IP sessions. SIP may however introduce significant delays when it runs on top of UDP over lossy (wireless) links. These delays are the result of the exponential back-off retransmission scheme that SIP uses to recover from packet loss, which has a default back-off time of half a second.In this paper, we empirically investigate the delay introduced by SIP when it runs on top of UDP over IEEE 802.11b links. We focus on the operation of SIP at the edge of an 802.11b cell (e.g., to update a mobile host's IP address after a handoff) as this is where SIP's retransmissions scheme is most likely to come into play. We experiment with a few 802.11 parameters that influence packet loss on the wireless link, specifically with different link-level retransmission thresholds, signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs), and amounts of background traffic. We conduct these experiments in a controlled environment that is free from interfering 802.11 sources.Our results indicate that (1) SIP usually introduces little delay except for an SNR range of a few dBs at the very edge of an 802.11 cell in which the delay increases sharply, and (2) that a maximum of four 802.11 retransmissions suffices to limit the delay introduced by SIP retransmissions. The first result is of interest to developers of SIP applications who have to decide at which SNR to initiate a handoff to another network. The second result allows network providers to optimize their 802.11b networks for delay sensitive SIP applications.

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Cited By

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  • (2012)Basic telephony SIP end - to - end performance metrics2012 IX International Symposium on Telecommunications (BIHTEL)10.1109/BIHTEL.2012.6412056(1-6)Online publication date: Oct-2012
  • (2011)Security study of voice communication over wireless local area network2011 International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Control (ICECC)10.1109/ICECC.2011.6067915(459-462)Online publication date: Sep-2011
  • (2008)Benchmark of middleware protocols for application and service interactionProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/1543137.1543145(40-47)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2008
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cover image ACM Conferences
WMASH '05: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM international workshop on Wireless mobile applications and services on WLAN hotspots
September 2005
128 pages
ISBN:1595931430
DOI:10.1145/1080730
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 02 September 2005

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Author Tags

  1. 802.11 networks
  2. SIP
  3. measurements
  4. signaling

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Cited By

View all
  • (2012)Basic telephony SIP end - to - end performance metrics2012 IX International Symposium on Telecommunications (BIHTEL)10.1109/BIHTEL.2012.6412056(1-6)Online publication date: Oct-2012
  • (2011)Security study of voice communication over wireless local area network2011 International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Control (ICECC)10.1109/ICECC.2011.6067915(459-462)Online publication date: Sep-2011
  • (2008)Benchmark of middleware protocols for application and service interactionProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/1543137.1543145(40-47)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2008
  • (2008)Call Setup Latency Analysis in SIP-Based Voice over WLANsIEEE Communications Letters10.1109/LCOMM.2008.07123012:2(103-105)Online publication date: Feb-2008
  • (2008)Quick transfer of media stream in FMC environment2008 First ITU-T Kaleidoscope Academic Conference - Innovations in NGN: Future Network and Services10.1109/KINGN.2008.4542294(401-406)Online publication date: May-2008
  • (2008)A reality check on sip-based streaming applications on the next generation mobile test network2008 3rd International Conference on Communication Systems Software and Middleware and Workshops (COMSWARE '08)10.1109/COMSWA.2008.4554430(302-308)Online publication date: Jan-2008

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