Whether it is because of the lower costs or the latest multimedia messaging, conferencing and unified communications (UC) applications, SIP has emerged as a leading industry standard. However, like any other technology, there are several security issues related to SIPs and this is where SBCs play their part.
Why You Need to Upgrade Your SBC?
If you are in process of evaluating your options for upgrading your session border controller, then below mentioned are some points which you can keep in mind. These things will help you in finding a SBC solution that ensures the next generation of high performance applications and communications services.
Real-time Quality of Service
The traditional SBC approach of highlighting the QoS by generating a call record after the call has taken place and estimating what happened during the session is no longer sufficient. Ensuring that service level quality of service on IP matches or surpasses TDM, requires proactive and real time monitoring of performance as calls and sessions take place. If you are migrating to IP, you need an SBC that can deliver real time QoS on IP with session quality monitored during, not after a call is made.
Advanced Efficiency in Multiservice Environment
With the service environment getting more dynamic and diversified, it becomes imperative to have an infrastructure that can answer the needs of the different IP based service/database infrastructures in the service provider’s network and can manage different services, ideally, with the same infrastructure.
If we look at the traditional systems, there appears inefficiency and a lack of agility to promptly turn out with new services. It is, therefore, vital that when searching for an SBC, it is better to ensure that the Service Management Framework is highly customizable. The advantage of such a framework is that it wipes out the need for individual software development cycle on a service-to-service basis and facilitates the rapid deployment of new services like WebRTC.
In-depth Session Analysis for Enhanced User Experience
Gone are the days when SBCs with basic analytics features for session quality would suffice. Modern SBCs must enable real quality of experience for which they must offer deeper analysis. In order to ensure that the end user is getting a satisfactory service, SBCs must perform deeper analysis of the session packet for voice quality. Simply looking at the packet statistics and jitter loss for quality of service estimation is not going to work anymore.
Simplifying SLA Management
Maintenance of SLAs is a tough job for operators as they need to perform monitoring and routing functions. SBCs with the functionality to enable dynamic QoS based routing can be of great use as they can simplify the SLA management for the operator by automating the whole process. Also, by using a GUI i.e. graphic user interface, SLAs can be programmed into the SBCs. This is useful for monitoring and alerting purposes. In order to ensure that SLAs are maintained at the desired level, the real-time QoS based analytics are collected and fed back into this dynamic routing analysis. With this, the overall SLA management process gets simplified to a great extent.
Alleviating Signaling Issues
The advancements in LTE deployments and the ever growing complexity of signaling simply indicates the growing inefficiencies of the networks. LTE to LTE calling in IP poses a number of challenges when terminating off-net to a non-VoLTE/non-IMS NGN SIP network. SBCs have the capability to eliminate this complexity as they have a built-in Signaling Procedure Adaptation Framework. This also allows for the conversion of traffic across diverse networks and service types. Operators can thus shift to homogeneous IP based infrastructures as networks don’t need to be operated in parallel.
The above mentioned points are some of the major growth factors for the IP networks in the coming time. If you’d like to discuss your need to upgrade your SBCs and discuss the areas of SBC deployment with us, we’d be delighted to have a quick chat.
