Columbia U. Columbia U. NTT When a large number of clients register with a SIP registrar server at approximately the same time, the server may become overloaded. Near-simultaneous floods of SIP SUBSCRIBE and PUBLISH requests may have similar effects. Such request avalanches can occur, for example, after a power failure and recovery in a metropolitan area. This document describes how to avoid such overload situations. Under this mechanism, a server estimates an avalanche restart backoff interval during its normal operation and conveys this interval to its clients through a new Restart-Timer header in normal response messages. Once an avalanche restart actually occurs, the clients perform backoff based on the previously received Restart-Timer header value before sending out the first request attempt. Thus, the mechanism spreads all the initial client requests and prevents them from overloading the server.