Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to telecommunications and more specifically to techniques for providing a bulk refresh of sessions in an IP network.
Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) has become popular and prevalent for communications. When a communication between two peers occurs, a session is created for the communication. As VoIP networks evolve into large end-to-end networks, messages, such as session initiation protocol (SIP) messages, increasingly have to traverse a larger number of intermediate hops before reaching a final endpoint. With unpredictable IP network delays and packet loss, the chances of losing the SIP messages are high. This occurs especially if User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or any other unreliable protocol is used to send messages.
When a SIP message is lost, this may lead to a hanging SIP session. A hanging SIP session is a session on one side of a communication that a peer thinks is active but is not active on the other side.
To address the issue of hanging SIP sessions, session refresh mechanisms are used. The refresh mechanisms use additional messaging to periodically validate the existence of SIP sessions between two peers. The validation determines if a SIP session is active on a peer. If the SIP session is not active, then it may be removed or terminated from a peer on the other side of the communication.
The method of refreshing the SIP sessions is performed on an individual session basis. For example, messaging for each individual session is performed to refresh each session. If there are 1000 sessions, then these 1000 sessions must be refreshed with 1000 separate messages. To compound the problem, multiple messages usually need to be sent to refresh each session. This puts additional load on the refresher requesting the session request and the refreshes who is performing the refreshing of the sessions.