Basic telephony SIP end - to - end performance metrics

The Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) has been recognized as a common signaling architecture for providing next generation multimedia services. In order to enhance perceived service quality regardless of access network and device, IMS supports Quality of Service (QoS) negotiation and signaling. The IMS procedures used for that purpose are based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Therefore, signaling performance of SIP plays an important role in affecting the overall Quality of Experience (QoE) in next generation networks. Although many standards to evaluate the performance of telephony signaling protocols have been proposed, none of the metrics address SIP. Recent research in this field has resulted in the definitions of a standard set of metrics for measuring the performance of end-to-end SIP for basic telephony service. This paper aims to provide an insight in the process of measuring and evaluating SIP performance metrics as defined in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) 6076. The open source IMS platform is used as the test environment for the purpose of examining SIP performance metrics under different conditions. Presented results show the impact of SIP signaling performance on QoE for IMS-based telephony service.