[SR-Users] Presence and call queueing - Kamailio and Asterisk

[Pover A.V.]

Summary: Using Kamailio to load balance between Asterisk servers. Trouble getting call queuing working because can't get device state hints to work reliably.

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Hello



I'd be grateful for any advice that can be offered for this problem to do with presence and call queueing.



I have 3 Kamailio (v5.3.4) servers that load-balance incoming traffic from various sources: a legacy PBX, soft phone clients, and a SIP trunking service.



Sitting behind the 3 Kamailio servers are 2 Asterisk (v16 LTS) servers.



Kamailio acts as a registrar and user location service. Asterisk is routing calls and (should be) providing device state information for each extension.



An external script builds a list of PJSIP endpoints based on the content of the Kamailio subscriber table, and deploys it to the Asterisk servers whenever a change is detected. The AOR for each record is configured to point to Kamailio. No authentication details are attached to these endpoints, as Kamailio is doing authentication before dispatching a request to Asterisk.



Whenever Kamailio receives an INVITE, it passes this to an Asterisk server using the dispatcher module (round-robin algorithm '4'); asterisk then processes the request.



At the moment, everything is working except for presence/device states and call queueing.



I've tried to set up 'presence', 'pua', 'dialog' and '(presence/pua)_dialoginfo' modules on Kamailio with limited success. The presence state when a user toggles 'do not disturb' on their soft phone is passed to other users who are subscribed (watching), however when a user makes a call, no presence updates are seen by subscribed users (the extensions show as 'Idle' or 'Available' instead of 'In Use' or 'Busy').



Asterisk is able to report that an extension is 'Ringing' or 'InUse' when a call is made to that extension, because an INVITE to an internal extension matches a pattern in the dialplan and Asterisk routes it to a PJSIP endpoint with the same name. However, when somebody makes a call, Asterisk is unable to track the state of the extension making the call because the call is going via Kamailio so Asterisk is not seeing the caller as an internal extension. We need a way to make Asterisk think the call is coming from an internal device if the caller ID matches a PJSIP endpoint.



Both Asterisk servers are configured to share device state updates with each other, and this is working.



Without being able to see device state for an internal calling party, we will be unable to reliably set up call queues in Asterisk.



Using the 'mohqueue' module on Kamailio is not something we want to do because of its reliance on a database, which is creating a single point of failure - if the database server is down for any reason, Kamailio refuses to start.



Ideally, we would achieve some form of distributed call queueing, however the simplest option seems to be setting up a queue on one Asterisk server and having an active-passive high availability configuration, should a server go down.



I'm looking for advice on how best to keep track of what is happening in a call, and for Asterisk to know the states of each extension and make these available in a dialplan hint. Or any other suggestions that might help to achieve call queueing in this setup.



Thank you

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