In February 2012, Infonetics Research published its inaugural Diameter Signaling Control worldwide and regional market size and forecasts report, in which we reported worldwide sales totaled $8.6M in CY11. The Diameter signaling controller market is in its infancy; as we predicted, a growing number of new products have launched in the past three months, and we expect more through 2012. As with all new markets, Diameter signaling controllers will expand functionality to meet operator requirements and use cases. We forecast revenue to grow at a 106.2% CAGR through CY16, resulting in $321.3M in revenue that year.

As mobile operators migrate to all-IP networks (access to core), signaling standards are migrating from SS7 to Diameter. At its core, Diameter enables the exchange of policy information within and between network operators. Diameter has also been developed as the foundation for authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) functions in IP-based networks.

Diameter signaling controllers provides centralized routing, traffic management, and load balancing among Diameter and non-Diameter elements within IMS and mobile broadband networks. It also supports protocol mediation and interworking functions between carrier networks. A fully loaded Diameter signaling controller will encompass the Diameter agents, DRA, DEA, and load balancing.

The move to all-IP mobile networks is being driven by LTE, and Infonetics forecasts that the number of LTE subscribers worldwide will grow from 9.2M in CY11 to 130.2M in CY15. The escalation of subscriber growth and the amount of signaling traffic these subscribers will generate is at the heart of our Diameter signaling controller forecast model.

As LTE networks are deployed and begin to grow, a key challenge is scaling the signaling and control plane due to the increasing amount of Diameter messages passing among network elements. Several global operators have experienced significant signaling storms in their LTE networks that in some cases have resulted in network outages. The storms have been caused by growing usage of the networks, but also by architectures that allow Diameter signaling to be dealt with on a peer-to-peer basis.

The increased use of mobile broadband networks is driving the growth of Diameter signaling within and between operators. This signaling traffic in turn has hastened the need for centralized controllers that can help manage the traffic in a more efficient and scalable manner. There are a number of key drivers to consider when evaluating the future growth of Diameter signaling traffic that will require signaling controllers:

• The continued rise in smartphone adoption as prices continue to drop due to strong competition and broad availability from high-end to low-end devices
• The availability of advanced 3G and LTE services such as tiered pricing and shared data plans, which require more frequent exchanges of policy and charging information
• The increase in the number of 3G and LTE network elements, particularly related to policy and control (e.g., PCRF, HSS, OCS), that must communicate with each other
• Roaming in LTE networks and between LTE and 3G networks, as well as subscribers moving between 3GPP (LTE/HSPA) and non-3GPP networks such as WiFi

A number of vendors are clamoring to play a role in this emerging market. We expect to see Diameter signaling controllers from at least 15 vendors by the end of 2012. Not all vendors will be successful, as the market cannot support that many, but we expect the competition to spur further innovation.

Today Tekelec is the front-runner in Diameter signaling control, with a strong revenue lead in 2011, helped by key wins in North America, including Verizon Wireless for its 3G and LTE networks and MetroPCS. With its heritage in SS7 and SIGTRAN, Tekelec has been an early mover in the Diameter signaling controller space and is well positioned for the future. In our February report, we asserted that Tekelec’s ability to draw upon its installed base of legacy customers will make it a formidable competitor. Since then, Tekelec has continued to increase its customer base for its Diameter Signaling Router (DSR), announcing 15 new customers across all regions, which confirms our statement. This brings their customer base to 19 for the DSR, totaling 1.8 million messages per second across a variety of use cases including interconnection for roaming, scaling policy deployments, core routing for LTE and IMS networks, and providing subscriber locator function in an LTE architecture.

Diane Myers

Principal Analyst, VoIP and IMS

diane@infonetics.com

Tekelec has won five new Diameter Signaling Router (DSR) customers. Tekelec’s DSR, the intelligent core of the New Diameter Network, helps operators manage mobile data and signaling growth and profit from mobile data services.

The new customers are:

• Two Asia-Pacific tier one operators that will use the DSR’s core routing and roaming capabilities for their LTE networks.
• A tier-one Western European operator that is testing core LTE network routing with the DSR. The operator began testing LTE last year.
• A Mexican wireless operator testing several Diameter traffic routing scenarios for its 3G network.
• A Canadian tier one LTE operator.

Read the full announcement here.

Today, Tekelec announced:

A tier one U.S. operator has selected Tekelec, the mobile broadband solutions company, to provide core Diameter routing, intelligent policy traffic routing and security for its LTE network.

Tekelec’s Diameter Signaling Router (DSR) will help the operator scale the LTE network and reduce costs, generate revenues from LTE roaming services and manage Diameter signaling and data traffic.

This is the fourth U.S. LTE operator to choose a new Diameter network from Tekelec. Earlier this month, industry analysis firm Infonetics Research named Tekelec as the “front runner” of the Diameter signaling control market.

Read the full announcement 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.

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.

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.

Director of Product Management Jason Emery discusses Diameter routing LTE and IMS use cases in his latest “Reality Check” column for RCR Wireless, including centralized routing, LTE-to-LTE roaming and HSS resolution.

Excerpt:

“Diameter signaling routers are becoming the central point in 3G, IMS and LTE networks for connecting, translating and interoperating Diameter traffic. As outlined in our previous article, a Diameter signaling infrastructure at the network core facilitates signaling between network elements, endpoints such as online and offline charging systems (OCSs/OFCSs), mobility management entities (MMEs), policy control and charging rules functions (PCRFs) and home subscriber servers (HSSs).”

Read the full article here.

The Path to LTE
This paper discusses how Service Providers can migrate their networks to all-IP LTE technology to help mitigate the effects of consumers’ never-ending appetite for bandwidth.

Monetization of Data Services
This paper highlights four use cases that illustrate how service providers can implement an intelligent approach to monetizing mobile broadband, including: personalized service tiers, simplified services for the multi-device customer, adding value to over-the-top applications, and casual usage and loyalty programs.

Tekelec’s Diameter Signaling Router (DSR) has been named a finalist for ‘Best New Product or Service of the Year’ by the 2011 American Business Awards (aka the Stevie Awards). Vote for the Tekelec DSR by visiting the People’s Choice Stevie Awards and entering short code T238L. Voting ends June 3.