Subject: I-D Action:draft-worley-redundancy-response-04.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 20:30:01 -0800 (PST)

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : Supporting Multiple Path Routing in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
	Author(s)       : D. Worley
	Filename        : draft-worley-redundancy-response-04.txt
	Pages           : 10
	Date            : 2009-03-06

An increasing number of SIP architectures implement multiple path
routing (MPR), which is the providing of more than one path for a
call to reach a destination user agent (UA).  A typical example is a
redundant pair of gateways from a SIP system to the PSTN.  A call
from the SIP system to the PSTN can pass through either gateway to
ultimately reach the destination telephone.  In order to gain the
benefits of redundancy in case one of the gateways fails or reaches
capacity, a proxy forks INVITEs serially to both gateways.

Unfortunately, if the call passes through one gateway but fails at
the destination phone (e.g., ring-no-answer), the proxy will then
fork the call to the other gateway, because the proxy has no way to
know that the call failed at the destination phone rather than at the
first gateway.  The second fork will fail in the same way at the same
destination phone.  This annoys both the caller (because the call
takes twice as long as it should before failing) and anyone within
earshot of the destination phone.  Similar failures plague any other
SIP architecture where a request can reach a destination through
multiple paths.

To gain the benefits of MPR without suffering from this problem, the
proxy which forks a request onto the redundant paths needs to be able
to determine if a fork that failed reached the destination UA and was
rejected by the UA (and so an alternate path should not be tried), or
if the fork failed before reaching the UA (and so an alternate path
should be attempted).  This document is to begin a discussion of
strategies for making this determination.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-worley-redundancy-response-04.txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

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