SIP Session Agent DNS-SRV Load Balancing

Prior to Release 6.2.0 the Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller provided the ability to specify an FQDN (fully qualified domain name) for a destination session-agent. During DNS lookup the FQDN could resolve to multiple SRV (Resource Record for Servers) records. Each SRV could resolve to a single IP address via A-Record query in IMS or DNS.

With Release 6.2.0 the Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller supports load balancing behavior as described in RFC 3263, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP): Locating SIP Servers.

The Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller will provide a new parameter ping-all-addresses in session-agent configuration mode to enable internal load balancing and RFC 3263 compliance. The Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller monitor the availability of the dynamically resolved IP addresses obtained from DNS server using OPTIONS ping (ping-per-DNS entry). The ping-method and ping-interval for each resolved IP addresses will be copied from original session-agent.

Status of Session-Agent:

In Service – if any of dynamically resolved IP addresses is in service

Out of service – if all dynamically resolved IP addresses is out of service.

The default of ping-all-addresses is disabled, in which case the Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller only pings the first available resolved IP addresses.

With status of each resolved IP addresses above, the Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller will recurse through the list of these in-service IP addresses dynamically resolved from DNS server on 503 response, and stop recursion based upon a configured list of response values specified by the stop-recurse parameter in sip-interface configuration mode. With internal load balancing enabled in the session-agent, the Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller provides the ability to select routing destinations based on SRV weights. The priority/weight algorithm is based on RFC 2782, A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV).

The Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller will provide the similar functionality as that listed above for A-records, the Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controllerwill select first available routing destinations because there is no priority/weight contained in A-records.