Acme Packet is breaking things down for its customers with standalone border gateway, session controller and signaling firewall solutions, which until now were available from the vendor only as part of its integrated session border controller solution.
These “decomposed” solutions, supported on both the Net-Net 4000 and 9000 series hardware platforms, provide Acme Packet’s distribution partners and service provider customers with increased flexibility and scalability in implementing next-generation IMS and derivative service architectures such as ETSI TISPAN, MSF and PacketCable.
Seamus Hourihan, Acme Packet’s vice president of marketing and product management, says different customers and partners have varying preferences for what functionality they want to support in these architectures, so decomposing the session border controller functions allows them to pick and choose. He notes that some customers may want to steer clear of deploying lots of signaling elements because that’s expensive and requires more hardware than does media control, for example. Also, perhaps more importantly, signaling makes troubleshooting more difficult, he says.
Acme Packet’s new standalone border gateway provides media control for voice, video and multimedia RTP/RTCP flows via an H.248 interface to a master Acme Packet session controller, or a third-party SIP softswitch or core IMS CSCF signaling element. The border gateway supports Acme Packet’s Net-SAFE media security features including media firewall, access control, network address and port translations, media relay and latching for NAT traversal, VLAN tagging, QoS marking, QoS and flow statistics reporting, bandwidth policing, media replication for lawful intercept, DTMF insertion/extraction, media timers and transcoding.
The session controller offers signaling control and security for voice, video and multimedia SIP message flows. It also uses an H.248 interface to control slave Acme Packet border gateways or third-party media proxies/relays. The session controller is implemented as a dialog stateful SIP back-to-back user agent (B2BUA) and is functionally equivalent to Acme Packet’s SD configuration in terms of SIP signaling control. This includes support for Acme Packet’s Net-SAFE signaling security features such as session border controller DoS/DDoS protection, admission control based upon session agent load or interface to external policy server, call gapping by session agent or destination number, SIP protocol repair, transport and encryption protocol interworking, number/address and response code translations, load balancing, routing including ENUM, lawful intercept and accounting.
The signaling firewall ensures security for core SIP signaling elements such as softswitches, IMS CSCF elements and application servers.The SF is available in four SIP security level options ranging from stateless firewall with static ACLs and SIP flow rate policing to dialog stateful SIP B2BUA.
Acme Packet expects to demo its signaling firewall at VON in September and its border gateway and session controller at the MultiService Forum’s interoperability event in late October. The products are slated for general availability in the fourth quarter.
Acme Packet www.acmepacket.com
