Voice over IP system recovery apparatus for service and packet groups based on failure detection thresholds

• US 8,040,796 B2
• Filed: 07/31/2008
• Issued: 10/18/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 07/31/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: WSOU Investments, LLC (WSOU Holdings, LLC)
• Original Assignee: Alcatel-Lucent SA (Nokia Corporation)
• Inventors: Beauford, Kevin D.
• Primary Examiner(s): Yao, Kwang B
• Assistant Examiner(s): Elpenord, Candal
• Application Number:
  US12/221,217
• Publication Number:
  US 20100027416A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,174 Days
• Field of Search: 370/216, 370/225, 370/242, 370/352, 370/245
• US Class Current: 370/225
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/16 Threshold monitoring
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/1104 Session initiation protocol [SIP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/40 for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity, e.g. service redundancy protocols, protocol state redundancy or protocol service redirection management of faults, events, alarms or notifications in data switching networks H04L41/06

Abstract

A system comprising a SIP failure chandler, wherein the SIP failure handler monitors SIP failures and issues an alert and reroutes call traffic based on a service group number if a SIP failure threshold is exceeded wherein the service group number is associated with a detected failure, where the service group comprises a plurality of IP addresses.

Claims

1. A system comprising:

a cellular processor;

wherein the cellular processor monitors SIP failures that occur during call setup;

wherein the cellular processor issues an alert and the system reroutes call traffic based on a service group number if a failure threshold for call setups is exceeded wherein the service group number is associated with a detected call setup failure wherein the call setup failure indicates that an attempted call has not been completed;

wherein the service group number identifies a service group where a service group comprises a plurality of IP addresses that are used in support of the call setup; and

the cellular processor receives the service group number in a failure message where the service group number is the service group over which the call could not be setup, where the failure message indicates that the call failed during setup.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the failure message is an IS-41 FAIL_X message further comprising user defined fields.

3. The system of claim 2 wherein the user defined fields further comprises at least one of a service group number, a failure reason and a failure type.

4. The system of claim 1 wherein the cellular processor increments a fail count when the cellular processor receives the failure message.

5. The system of claim 1 wherein a fail count is maintained for each service group.

6. The system of claim 5 wherein a service group has an associated failure threshold.

7. The system of claim 6 wherein if the fail count for the service group exceeds the associated failure threshold, the cellular processor reroutes calls to a service group other than the service group associated with the service group number comprising the failure message.

8. The system of claim 6 wherein the associated failure threshold is at least one of a hard failure threshold, static time window and a moving time window.

9. The system of claim 8 wherein the failure threshold is configurable through a human machine interface.

10. The system of claim 9 wherein the cellular processor routes calls to a service group when the fail count associated with the service group is cleared.

11. The system of claim 3 wherein the failure reason is at least one of a SIP interworking failure or a SIP resource failure.

12. The system of claim 3 wherein the failure type is at least one of a failure to seize a trunk, a failure to create an real-time transport protocol (RTP) session, or a SIP connectivity problem, a time-out, a failed translation, a provisioning failure, or a link failure.

13. The system of claim 1, wherein the cellular processor communicated the service group number in a call setup message, where the service group number comprises an IP address on which the call is to be setup.

14. A method of routing calls based on a service group number where the method is performed on a cellular processor comprising the steps of:

monitoring SIP failures that occur during call setup;

issuing an alert and rerouting call traffic based on a service group number if a failure threshold for call setups is exceeded wherein the service group number is associated with a detected call setup failure wherein the call setup failure indicates that an attempted call has not been completed, wherein the service group number identifies a service group where a service group comprises a plurality of IP addresses that are used in support of the call setup; and

receiving the service group number in a failure message where the service group number is the service group over which the call could not be setup, where the failure message indicates that the call failed during setup.

15. The method of claim 14 wherein the service group number identifies a service group which comprises a plurality of IP addresses that are used in support of setting up calls.

16. The method of claim 14 wherein the failure message further comprises at least one of a failure reason and a failure type;

wherein the failure reason is at least one of a SIP interworking failure or a SIP resource failure; and

wherein the failure type is at least one of a failure to seize a trunk, a failure to create a real-time transport protocol (RTP) session, or a SIP connectivity problem, a time-out, a failed translation, a provisioning failure, or a link failure.

17. The method of claim 16 wherein a fail count is compared with the failure threshold where the fail count in incremented when the failure message is received.

18. The method of claim 17 wherein the step of comparing the fail count with the failure threshold further comprises tracking the fail count on a service group basis.

19. The method of claim 18 wherein the step of comparing the fail count with the failure threshold further comprises maintaining at least one of a hard failure threshold, a static time window and a moving time window.

20. The method of claim 14, wherein the service group number is communicated in a call setup message, where the service group number comprises an IP address on which the call is to be setup.