Congestion avoidance in S-CSCF selection in an IMS network

In the signaling plane of an IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) network, the interrogating Call/Session Control Function (I-CSCF) is required to choose the serving CSCF (S-CSCF) for user requests arriving at the proxy CSCFs (P-CSCF). This requires S-CSCF selection in such a way that the response time is minimized. However, in an overloaded situation, the P-CSCF entry points for arriving requests must balance between rejecting new requests and having an acceptable response time from S-CSCF for those that are allowed to enter. In this setting, we consider a number of controls for congestion avoidance that work in conjunction with S-CSCF selection in an IMS Network. For balancing between rejection of requests and the response time, we also propose a composite metric. Through our studies on grid topologies, we observe that one of the avoidance algorithms, the bang-bang control, generally shows to be the most promising toward striking a good balance between rejection of requests and the response time.