Broadband Voice

Market and Requirement

Voice over IP and Multimedia over IP services to residential customers have now become a mainstream offering, with services provided over any broadband access infrastructure, such as DSL or Cable. Access to voice and multimedia services at the residential site can be via a PC, an IP phone or an adapter to a traditional telephone. Session border controllers enable the service provider to access the residential user across NAT and firewall devices whilst also providing Quality of Service, core network security and Regulatory compliance.

The market for broadband voice and multimedia services is now growing rapidly. iLocus estimates that by mid 2005 there were 14.5 million consumer voice over broadband subscribers, and that the number of subscribers in the top 10 countries alone will exceed 130 million by 2009. This rapid growth and competitive marketplace will dictate new requirements in a session border control market that has been largely dominated by tactical deployment decisions. A network diagram is shown below:

The following will be key if investment return is to be maximised.

• Session border controllers must be able to scale flexibly and to a large capacity.
• They must provide additional growth capacity for new services as carriers strive to differentiate their services. Services like video will significantly increase the capacity requirements on session border controllers.
• They must provide security for the operator's core network and for subscribers, whilst also preventing service theft.
• They must be capable of being deployed in a flexible manner. Signalling and media resource must be physically separable to meet the deployment scenarios of some operators.
• They must provide regulatory services such as Emergency Call Handling and Lawful Intercept, which are now being mandated as broadband telephony and multimedia mature.
• They must be capable of evolving to IMS and TISPAN architectures to ensure investment reuse as the carrier's network moves towards the converged network architecture space.

The Newport Networks 1460 is the only product that is capable of providing the required level of feature function today, and also provides the level of flexibility required to deal with a rapidly expanding user-base and uncertain network evolution requirements.

Key Newport Networks 1460 Broadband Capabilities

Future Proof Investment

• The 1460 can be deployed as a traditional session border controller or it can be physically separated into a MediaProxy and SignallingProxy providing deployment flexibility.
• Multiple MediaProxies can be controlled from one SignallingProxy if required.
• Common hardware is used in combined session border control deployments and separated signalling and media deployments.
• Both combined session border control deployments and separated signalling and media deployments can be upgraded for IMS and converged network use as required by the network operator ensuring maximum investment reuse.

Access Reach

• Secure traversal of NAT and firewall devices whether deployed at the customer premise or in the core network.
• Intelligent filtering of SIP re-registrations to minimise signalling load on Softswitches/proxies.
• Scaling from 5,000 to 100,000 simultaneous bi-directional calls on a single chassis.
• Support for up to 1 million concurrent registered subscribers.

Quality of Service

• Type of Service (ToS) and DiffServe Code Point (DSCP) remapping on a per-user and per-session basis ensuring that users do not exceed negotiated/specified quality.
• Session Admission Control applied to physical interfaces, VLANs and IP address groupings, ensuring that residential Service Level Agreements are met.
• Load balancing across multiple core network Softswitches/Proxies.
• Bandwidth policing on a per-session basis to ensure sessions do not exceed negotiated rate.

Security

• Network Address and Port Translation (NAPT) provides topology hiding for core network.
• Malformed or 'illegal' SIP signalling discarded.
• Rate limiting of Registration messages to protect core network Softswitches/Proxies.
• All media traffic from non registered IP addresses discarded at line rate.
• Policing of signalling traffic, media traffic and quality monitoring (RTCP) stream. This prevents inappropriate use (fraud).

Regulatory

• Lawful Intercept for CALEA and ETSI.
• Supported national variants including, but not limited to: USA, Canada, UK, Germany, Italy.
• Emergency Call Handling facilities allowing Session Admission Control to be suspended for emergency calls and calls to be passed to designated Emergency Call Handling Proxies.

Resilience

• The 1460 has no single point of failure providing in excess of 99.999% availability.
• All system modules are 1 + 1 resilient including power distribution units, fans and disks.
• Physical link aggregation (802.3-2002) provides link resilience and load balancing.