[Freeswitch-users] New feature - NAT handling, keep-alive OPTIONS

[kokoska rokoska]

Hi all,


First of all I have say I'm very impressed by FreeSWITCH SIP handling. 
It way differs from what I know from Asterisk :-)
A lot of my previous questions about adding/modifying SIP headers are 
irrelevant becasuse FreeSWITCH do the job automagically...

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Now why I want to say:

I think about new feature which may (or may not :-) slightly off-load 
the FreeSWITCH in case of handling a lot of SIP clients behind NAT.

If I understand my pcap dumps right, now in case of 10.000 UACs behind 
NAT FreeSWITCH tries to send more than 2000 OPTIONS per second to the 
UACs. If I don't miss something, it is too much, I think :-)


My idea is to use NAT-hack for only some of UACs, send NAT keep-alive 
OPTIONS for only UACs it realy need it (based on administrator decision) 
and make periodicity of NAT keep-alive packets configurable.

I briefly looked into the sources and I think the solution could be like 
this:

1. Introduce new "per profile" variable "nat_keep_alive" meaning number 
of seconds between sending of OPTIONS.

2. Introduce new variable "sip_contact_ip" in Directory http post to 
xml_curl. This is helpful - if compared to "ip" - to decide if NAT-hack 
should be applied.

3. Introduce new variable "enable_nat_ping" which defaults to "yes". 
This var could be in replies to Directory http posts.

4. Remove sofia_reg_nat_callback from sofia_reg_check_expire and 
introduce independant call from sofia_profile_worker_thread_run driven 
by value of "nat_keep_alive" variable.

5. Modify DB table sip_registrations - add indexed TINYINT column 
"nat_ping" and write to this column value of variable "enable_nat_ping".

6. Select UACs for sending NAT keep-alive OPTINS from DB based by 
indexed column search instead of by expensive fullscan of table with 
"LIKE '%sometihng%'".


This is what I think could be useful. Any comments are welcome :-)
Expecially if somebody see it handy too or even works on something 
similar - to work together.
If you see I miss something important or you see any drawback in my 
suggestion, please tell me it :-). Thanks!


Best regards,

kokoska.rokoska