The ongoing move toward virtualizing network functions is growing to include such services as policy, routing and diameter. This move is seen as ideal for such functions, which are becoming increasingly taxed by the growth in mobile data traffic.
Oracle recently estimated that worldwide LTE diameter signaling traffic was at about 12 million messages per second, and projects that this volume will increase to 99 million messages per second by 2017. By that time policy will account for 62% of signaling volumes, surpassing centralized routing and roaming. Policy is becoming the biggest source of signaling traffic, but it is not the fastest growing traffic source. Oracle says that distinction goes to online charging, which will grow at a compound average annual growth rate of 180% through 2017.
Moving these functions to a virtualized environment allows operators to more rapidly scale their needs in order to meet the growing demand while at the same time trimming future capital expenses. A number of vendors are working in the space, including Sonus Networks, Diametriq and Tekelec.
RCR Wireless News spoke with Mykola Konrad, VP of cloud and strategic alliances at Sonus Networks, to gain more insight into the move, where potential bottlenecks may occur, the importance of standards in terms of virtualization and challenges facing continued progress.
Sonus this week announced it has bolstered its session border controller platform in a move designed to help enterprises deploy unified communication features. The updates include support for session initiation protocol interoperability with the H.323 standard that through the Sonus SBCs can enforce security policies at the edge of the network. Sonus also expanded the ability to manage and configure its SBC products using the representational state transfer application programming interface to its SBC 5000 series, SBC 7000 and SBC Software edition SBCs.
In terms of further virtualization, Sonus also rolled out its cloud-based Real-Time Communications Monitoring as a Service offering, which it said will provide a single point of “proactive fault surveillance for customers’ managed SBCs.” Sonus said the system can begin “working issues” as soon as an alarm is identified instead of waiting for a “customer-initiated trouble ticket.”
Sonus also reported that its SBC portfolio has completed interoperability testing with BroadSoft’s BroadWorks platform and that Broadsoft was now deploying Sonus’ SBCs as part of its BroadCloud managed service. The move is designed to allow for the deployment of hosted multimedia and unified communication services by enterprise session initiation protocol trunking customers. Sonus noted that such a move can allow enterprises to sell hosted voice over Internet Protocol and UC services.
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