Effect of head of the line blocking on session initiation protocol session establishment delays

We have studied the effect of head of the line blocking (HOLB) on session initiation protocol (SIP) session establishment delays. Our results are based on experiments performed in a test bed and on the public Internet. We used the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) as a transport for SIP because SCTP can be configured to suffer or to avoid HOLB. Our experiments show that the effect of HOLB on session establishment delays generally starts to be significant starting at fairly low packet loss rates. However, there are scenarios where network conditions are good enough to make the effect of HOLB insignificant.