VOIP SYSTEM WITH HIGH AVAILABILITY

Background. With the exponential growth of the internet and an increasing number of VoIP (Voice over IP) deployments arose a need to manage and scale the systems in terms of high availability and minimal downtime. Objective. The purpose of the paper is to reveal methods of increasing the VoIP system’s availability. Main challenges associated with the operation of VoIP systems are analysed, particularly the need to ensure service continuity, fault tolerance, scalability and resource efficiency. Methods. Increasing the availability of a VoIP system is based on the use of free software: Kamailio (SIP signalling server), RTPengine (media traffic processing), Redis (in-memory database for storing RTP transactions), and Linux Ubuntu as a host operating system. Results. The implemented architecture reflects automatic failover of signalling servers and media gateways, load balancing and seamless switching to a backup node in case of failure of one or more components. Conclusions. The approach given drastically differs from others, where failure of one of the key elements (the signalling server or the media gateway) leads to immediate termination of all active connections. An experimental simulation of the system was performed by deploying a high availability schema depicted in Fig. 2 in a virtual environment and confirmed its high efficiency: even in the event of 50% of component failure, the system remains operational and does not interrupt any call.