Tier-1 operators are concerned about the impact of Diameter signaling traffic on their IP-enabled networks – with good reason. Data applications are multiplying like bunnies, driving a surge in signaling traffic. As the volume builds, operators face the real possibility of watching their network performance and service quality deteriorate.

Verizon Wireless, one of the most aggressive adopters of LTE, has read the writing on the network wall: edge-based approaches won’t cut it when it comes to scaling their Diameter traffic. The company has opted for a centralized approach to managing its Diameter traffic with the deployment of Tekelec’s Diameter Signaling Router (DSR), delivered on its EAGLE® XG platform. On the 4G side of the network, the DSR will provide load balancing, charging proxy and support for inter-carrier roaming between LTE networks; on the 3G side, load balancing and charging proxy functions.

Current Analysis recently summed it up: “The transaction arguably establishes Tekelec as the overseer of the highest-profile deployment in the very young Diameter signaling controller market.”

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Diameter traffic is rising. How can operators manage this growing mesh? Director of Product Management Jason Emery in his latest “Reality Check” column for RCR Wireless examines how to manage the Diameter network.

Excerpt:

The rise of Diameter traffic is analogous to the early days of SS7 traffic growth. In the 90s, service providers began struggling with an exponentially growing mesh of SS7 connections as they added more equipment to support subscriber growth. The solution was to standardize around a core routing function called the signal transfer point to create a reliable, scalable SS7 network.

The result was an architecture that lowered operating costs, supported multiple interfaces and industry standards and provided flexible configurations. This permitted service providers to cost-effectively grow their networks and work with one another on essential capabilities such as subscriber roaming and the delivery of revenue-generating services.

Read the entire article here.

Next week Tekelec will be sponsoring and speaking at 4G World in Chicago, Ill.

Randy Fuller, director of strategic marketing, will speak as a panelist at the “Role of Network Services in Delivering Differentiated Services” session during the “Service Enabling Strategies For 4G” track. Mr. Fuller will focus on policy management and enforcement, real-time charging and network intelligence that will enable service providers to profit from 4G services. The panel will be held on October 25 at 3:40 p.m. CT.

The next day at 2:30 p.m. CT, Matt McCann, principal architect, CTO Office, will discuss how to cost effectively scale and secure Diameter traffic in 4G networks. Mr. McCann will speak on key Diameter interfaces and policy, charging and mobility management. Discussion topics include several Diameter routing use cases:

• Policy, charging, roaming and home subscriber server (HSS) access networks
• Connection and transaction scalability
• Screening and topology hiding
• Stateful and stateless routing
• Network monitoring and intelligence

To view more information, check our press release.

In a recent Heavy Reading Policy survey, more than two-thirds of the respondents said they want to define their own policies, so they are seeking a policy-creation environment that is easy to use. Tekelec offers the leading policy management technology in the market and is the expert in deploying policy control solutions that are easy to use. Operators can easily add and re-configure policies to manage and control Quality of Service (QoS), charging, quota, optimization and admission control.

The Tekelec Policy Server supports a large menu of features and service plans, providing operators with the ability to establish business rules based on real-time information pulled from subscriber information, the network, or service behavior.

For more information, please download our free whitepaper: Why Tekelec for Policy Management – Ease of Use

This article originally appeared in Telecom Engine.

While their predictions may vary, virtually every industry analyst foresees staggering growth in mobile data in the next five to ten years. ABI Research expects a 39% compound annual growth rate from 2011 to 2016 in mobile data traffic. Looking out to the year 2020, Jeffries forecasts a 100x ramp in mobile data, and, the firm admits, that’s likely a conservative estimate. Faced with this looming data deluge, operators are turning to all-IP networks like IMS and LTE, which rely heavily on Diameter protocol, to move and monetize their data traffic.

Diameter’s Network Role

Diameter handles critical functions within the control and service planes of 3G and 4G IP networks. It provides the AAA framework to give subscribers permission to access services and enable operators to bill customers based on filters like usage and time of day. It’s essential for mobility management, enabling subscribers to roam freely in partner networks. And, it’s the language network elements like PCRFs, GGSNs, charging systems, subscriber databases, and application servers use to communicate with each other.

Diameter Drawbacks

But, there’s a hitch many operators haven’t considered as they deploy their all-IP IMS and LTE networks. As the data traffic swells, so will Diameter signaling activity. With most current networks solutions, each Diameter-based element communicates with every other component through direct signaling links, creating a spider web of connections. Each Diameter node must handle all session-related tasks such as routing, traffic management, redundancy, and service implementation. In the near term, deploying an IMS or LTE network without a signaling core may be adequate. However, as traffic levels swell, the lack of a capable signaling infrastructure creates problems related to scalability, congestion control, network interconnect, subscriber to HSS mapping, and PCRF binding. The situation is very similar to what operators encountered with early SS7 deployments and ultimately resolved by creating centralized, hierarchical routing network.

Creating a Signaling Layer in IP Networks

The Diameter protocol defines a new network node – the Diameter agent – which operators can leverage to create a Diameter signaling layer in IP networks. The DA performs essential network tasks like relay, proxy, redirect, and translation. Centralizing these functions in the network core eliminates the Diameter mesh, a consequence of having point-to-point signaling connections. Endpoints like MMEs, HSSs and CSCFs are relieved of routing, traffic management and load balancing tasks, which improves signaling performance and network scalability. From its vantage point in the network core, the DA provides a centralized location for Diameter mediation as well as a gateway to other networks to support roaming, security and topology hiding. And, the benefits don’t stop there. The DA can be employed to address a variety of use cases specific to IMS and LTE networks.

Centralized Routing

As the demands on LTE networks grow, operators often deploy additional MMEs and HSS front ends to support increasing loads. But, if there’s no separate Diameter signaling core, adding new elements creates its own challenge. Since Diameter uses SCTP or TCP for transport, each network resource in the EPC must have a direct SCTP or TCP connection to every element with which it communicates. The end result is a logical mesh network.  As a result, the addition of a new node requires network, configuration and routing updates at each and every network element, a costly and time consuming process.

Acting as a Diameter relay, the DA reduces the number of SCTP or TCP associations in the network. When new elements are added, they are connected to a mated pair of DAs – not to every other resource in the network. The task of maintaining routing tables and status updates is simplified, since changes are required only at the DA rather than at every endpoint. The centralized DA proxies information for decentralized elements like MMEs and HSSs. Then end result: a less complex, more scalable network with lower OPEX.

PCRF Binding

When multiple PCRFs are deployed in a network, there has to be a mechanism to balance the assignment of user sessions across them and make sure that all messages associated with a particular user’s session are handled by the same PCRF. That’s no simple task since messages can arrive on different interfaces like the Gx and Rx and may be identified by different elements such as an IMSI or IP address.

A Diameter agent deployed at the network core can provide static binding or dynamic load sharing across PCRFs when a user’s session is first established. The DA ensures that subsequent messages for that subscriber over the Gx, S9, Gxx, or Rx reference points are sent to the same PCRF. That functionality can be extended across multiple DAs in the network, which communicate with each other to act like a single, logical DRA.

HSS Address Resolution

With multiple HSSs in an LTE network, subscribers can be homed on different platforms.  Operators, therefore, need a way to maintain the association of subscribers to HSSs. The DA centralizes routing data and provides the mapping between a subscriber identity such as an IMS public ID or IMSI and an HSS. With that flexibility, operators can map individual subscriber numbers to a particular HSS, easily move subscribers from one HSS to another, or even split subscriber number ranges across different HSSs. Since routing data is centralized, HSS provisioning is much easier, and updates can be performed dynamically as new HSSs are placed in service

Conclusion

Operators are turning to all-IP networks like IMS and LTE to provide the bandwidth to support swelling data loads. However, if those networks are deployed without a separate Diameter signaling core, a host of challenges related to scalability, security, mobility management, and routing will arise as traffic loads escalate. Providers can overcome these challenges by leveraging the Diameter agent’s proxy, redirect, relay, and translation capabilities. Consolidating these functions at a DA in the network core creates a Diameter signaling layer that relieves endpoints of routing, traffic management and load balancing responsibilities. The resulting architecture provides the flexibility and scalability to support even the most data-intensive devices and applications.

A new on-demand Webinar  discusses the top reasons why service providers should choose Tekelec for their Policy Management solution. Tekelec offers the leading policy management technology in the market and is the expert in deploying policy control solutions that are easy to use. Operators can easily add and re-configure policies to manage and control Quality of Service (QoS), charging, quota, optimization and admission control.

The Webinar is available for free download here.

Tekelec product manager, Jason Emery, spoke with Telecom Engine on Diameter routing and how the Diameter Signaling Router (DSR) product supports multiple networks, including LTE, through the centralization of routing, traffic management and load-balancing tasks:

TelecomEngine: How is the Diameter Signaling Router (DSR) applicable for both LTE and 3G networks?

Jason Emery: The Diameter Signaling Router has five different categories of use cases, and of the five use cases there are three that are particularly applicable to both LTE and 3G networks: charging proxy, policy proxy and core routing.

The charging proxy functionality is a load balancing, topology hiding and session binding capability that operators place in the middle of their offline or online charging solutions.  Topology hiding masks the address of the end server from the server that’s connecting to it.  For example, if a gateway has a subscriber attached to it, it doesn’t need to know the address of a charging server in the network. It only has to know the address of the DSR.  The DSR then picks a charging server to serve that gateway and by doing that operators reduce opex because they don’t have to constantly update all of the gateways in the network with the charging server addresses. It also does load balancing, which is picking a server to deliver the charging information.  The last task in this use case is session binding, which makes sure that once a charging server is selected, all the billing records about an individual session go to the same charging server.  This is important to eliminate a lot of post processing of billing information that would otherwise have to happen.

You can read the full article here.

Senior Product Manager Susan Hackman provides a brief update on the Diameter Signaling Router, including Tekelec’s win with Verizon Wireless and the Diameter Learning Center.