Patent ID: 7869364

Claim:
A method to manage overload for a session initiation protocol (SIP) server, comprising: receiving SIP messages at the SIP server from a communications network; processing, in the SIP server, the received SIP messages to obtain processed SIP messages, wherein said processing comprises: (a) parsing received incoming SIP messages to classify the messages as one of non-call processing (non-CallP) related or call processing (CallP) related and placing the classified SIP messages in one of a non-CallP decoder queue or a Call-P decoder queue based on the classification; (b) parsing a queued SIP message to determine if the queued SIP message is a new request or a request or response associated with an existing session and placing the queued SIP message in one of a new adapter queue associated with a new session or an existing adapter queue associated with an existing session based on the determination; (c) pulling a message off an adapter queue, processing the message, and applying appropriate services; (d) passing required information in reference to an existing session to an encoder queue; and (e) pulling information off the encoder queue, building an out-bound SIP message, and sending the outbound SIP message; detecting an overload based on a trigger condition associated with at least one resource metric as a result of receiving SIP messages from the communications network at the SIP server and processing the received SIP messages in the SIP server; transitioning the SIP server to an overload state and applying associated control actions thereto when the overload is detected to mitigate the overload.