SIP server security with TLS: Relative performance evaluation

VoIP (Voice over Internet) provides delivery of voice information over unsecured IP-based networks like the Internet. VoIP data, signaling and voice, needs to be secured in such an environment. Security mechanisms take their toll on VoIP system performance. SIP is dominant signaling protocol for VoIP. This paper measures relative decrease in VoIP performance of system with secured SIP signaling over one without it. It compares SIP with authentication enabled over three transport protocols: UDP, TCP and TLS. Peak throughput of concurrent calls, registration request delay, session request delay, SIP server CPU and RAM usage are measured. Testbed environment consists of Asterisk IP private branch exchange (PBX) as a part of Elastix server, several SIP user agents and SIPp traffic generator. Test results show that performance of SIP over TLS based signaling is four times lower than the SIP signaling over UDP in most metrics.