The architecture decisions you make now for your New Diameter Network will have far reaching implications. These decisions will impact how your network will perform and how successful you will be in delivering mobile data services. That being said, the New Diameter Network must be created with flexibility and security in mind.

Flexibility

Rolling out services quickly – in days or weeks, not months – is a critical weapon in the battle to capture customers and generate revenues from OTT, Cloud and M2M services. In this competitive and rapidly changing market, service providers can’t afford long development and test cycles. They need the flexibility to rapidly develop, test, implement, and get feedback on new services. To do so, operators must take control of their own service creation with easy-to-use policy creation tools that support integrated analytics, open interfaces, and a wide variety of pre-configured use cases. By coupling those tools with a unified subscriber database with open application interfaces, service providers can leverage dynamic data to create highly personalized, targeted services.

Security

Operators are quickly realizing that they face the real threat of being marginalized by non-traditional, Internet players. To prevent this erosion, they need to sharpen their focus on the more profitable part of the mobile data chain – enabling content and personalized services – by forging revenue-sharing relationships with third-party players. Operators have the opportunity to claim their stake in the mobile content ecosystem by leveraging their unique network assets and customer data to add value to OTT, Cloud and M2M applications. But, they’ll have to tread carefully as they do to ensure the security of their networks and the privacy of their subscribers. That requires a Diameter network that allows providers to securely exposure select subscriber data, policies and analytics to third parties while shielding the underlying network architecture from view. The network must also enable providers to protect the privacy of their subscribers by allowing them to easily opt-in and out of advertising campaigns and special promotions that use subscriber data.

For more information about Diameter protocol, check out the Diameter Learning Center.

This article is part of the series Architecting the New Diameter Network. Next time, we’ll examine the need for Standards and interoperability as you build your robust Diameter network.