Feasibility of rtpengine located behind a HAProxy UDP Balancer

Denys Pozniak

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Dec 1, 2025, 5:54:43 AM12/1/25

to Sipwise rtpengine

Hello,

I am reaching out to see if anyone in the community has experience or insights regarding the feasibility of placing rtpengine behind a HAProxy UDP load balancer.

I understand that balancing RTP/UDP traffic in this way is generally not a conventional or ideal setup, but I am exploring this possibility for our architecture.

The core issue is related to maintaining the original client IP address when traffic is passed through the balancer. For a proper media session, rtpengine needs to know the true source IP and port of the upstream client for correct routing and security.

I am looking for a mechanism similar to what Kamailio has for SIP/TCP based traffic (tcp_accept_haproxy=yes).

Does rtpengine have a built-in or configurable feature to accept and parse the PROXY protocol header on UDP traffic?

For reference, the PROXY protocol specification is available here: https://www.haproxy.org/download/1.8/doc/proxy-protocol.txt

Thank you in advance for your help.

udp_lb.png

Richard Fuchs

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Jan 19, 2026, 7:31:27 AMJan 19

to rtpe...@googlegroups.com

On 01/12/2025 06.54, Denys Pozniak wrote:
> I am reaching out to see if anyone in the community has experience or
> insights regarding the feasibility of placing rtpengine behind a
> HAProxy UDP load balancer.
> I understand that balancing RTP/UDP traffic in this way is generally
> not a conventional or ideal setup, but I am exploring this possibility
> for our architecture.
>
> The core issue is related to maintaining the original client IP
> address when traffic is passed through the balancer. For a proper
> media session, rtpengine needs to know the true source IP and port of
> the upstream client for correct routing and security.
>
> I am looking for a mechanism similar to what Kamailio has for SIP/TCP
> based traffic (tcp_accept_haproxy=yes).
>
> Does rtpengine have a built-in or configurable feature to accept and
> parse the PROXY protocol header on UDP traffic?

There is no support for this currently, and a quick Google tells me that
UDP load balancing is only available for the enterprise edition HAproxy,
so this could only be implemented blindly based on the specs.

Are you thinking of just the control connections, or are you thinking of
passing the RTP media itself through HAproxy?

With UDP being connectionless, how would the reverse direction work?

Cheers

Denys Pozniak

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Jan 19, 2026, 7:36:21 AMJan 19

to Sipwise rtpengine

Hey!

> Are you thinking of just the control connections, or are you thinking of

passing the RTP media itself through HAproxy?

There was an idea to place RTPengine behind Cloudflare Spectrum for proxying RTP