BroadForward Diameter mediation empowers operators to quickly resolve Diameter interoperability issues and enable advanced signaling scenarios. It works in multi-vendor, multi-protocol environments without the need for scripting and without the need for vendor involvement.
Numerous Diameter implementations and variants
Diameter has become the principal connectivity protocol in most operator networks. Although Diameter is standardized, there are over 50 different Diameter interfaces and many vendor specific variants. Signaling between nodes in the operator network is handled by a specific Diameter application. Each Diameter application variant can cause interoperability issues leading to a service outage. Over the last decades operators have had to deal with integration of an increasing amount of complex network products from different vendors. Vendors typically use their own variant of the Diameter protocol and vary in the level of flexibility they can offer when it comes to fixing protocol interoperability issues. This has made it very difficult for operators to take control of their signaling network.
BroadForward Diameter mediation
BroadForward offers advanced mediation capabilities in a single software solution. It is a product designed specifically for mediation and interworking across access networks, across vendor specific products and across proprietary protocol variants.The solution uses GUI based configuration and doesn’t need proprietary scripting or core development. It supports conversion of protocol messages on a per-event (e.g. 3GPP Gy CCR-I) and per-AVP (e.g. Destination-Host) basis whereby both field names, values and header flags can be manipulated. It further supports many operations that can be applied to any field in the message, ranging from simple mapping operations (e.g. COPY, MOVE, SET) to complex operations on attribute value level. The solution is capable of stateful scenarios involving storing/retrieving of values over multiple messages in a session, using the on-board high available Session Store. It has no problem handling proprietary extensions of the protocol that only one of the interface end-points support. The GUI provides signaling orchestration ‘out-of-the-box’ allowing for easy management of all signaling related actions such as changing conversion rules that apply to a given event and field. With this solution operators take back control of their signaling network, escape vendor lock-in, and achieve faster resolution of interoperability issues while significantly reducing R&D efforts and cost.
Supporting any Diameter application
BroadForward Diameter mediation is fully compliant with RFC6733 and supports any Diameter application, including Gx, Gy, Gz, Rx, Ro, Rf, Sy, Sh, SLh, S6a, S6b, S6d, S9, S13, SWm, SWx, Cx, Dx, Wg (NASREQ), Wx, Diameter SIP Application, MM10 and SCAPv1/v2. It supports all transport mechanisms defined for Diameter: IPv4 or IPv6, TCP or SCTP and TLS over TCP or SCTP.
By means of protocol templates, it supports all Diameter applications such as 3GPP Gx or Rx. Support for different Diameter applications or application versions or variants is a matter of producing a protocol template for this application. Protocol templates for the most common Diameter applications come with the solution.
Adapting to changes ‘on the fly’
BroadForward Diameter mediation allows users to quickly react to upgrades of existing interfaces, or integration of new EPC, IMS, OSS/BSS or IT systems causing interface incompatibilities. Adapting to changes is as simple as using the GUI to change the conversion rules and apply them. At any time, updated conversion rules can be implemented without a need to re-start, enabling ‘live’ installation and modification of new services without service down-time.
Benefits
BroadForward Diameter mediation has many advantages over both traditional (vendor specific) customizations and bespoke professional services:
- Tools, management and manipulation of protocols and AVPs work the same across vendor products and variants
- Extensive mediation capabilities: on the fly adaptations to any Diameter variant, through built-in flexibility to quickly adjust and customize interfaces to specific customer environments, new use cases and future system updates;
- Wide range of mediation and service logic functions, enabling the user to quickly set up new connections, allowing to work with different Diameter products and brands, and smoothly solving Diameter incompatibilities;
- GUI based configuration, no vendor dependency and no need for R&D or scripting;
- Extendable solution, through on-board support for multiple network technologies: works across Diameter, RADIUS, SS7 and various IT (Including HTTP) protocols. Other interfaces and functions (e.g. DRA/DEA) can be supported by the same solution without re-linking and integration;
- Low CAPEX & OPEX: single integrated platform for Diameter routing and interworking, running on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware or virtualized / hosted;
- Network-wide capacity license: one throughput capacity license across all customer regions, sites, locations and (virtual) machines (so no ‘per-box pricing’) and across all Diameter applications and variants.
- Runs on any off-the-shelf hardware or in a virtualized environment. It is a 100% software based solution, hardware-agnostic and support virtualization and cloud deployment as well as containerized application deployment.