ipx solution

GENBAND Intelligent IPX SolutionMay 2012

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IPX at a GlanceAs more fixed and mobile carriers and service providers increasingly move to IP-based networks, the complexity required to interconnect these networks grows dramatically. Strategies for interconnecting IP networks, including those based on heterogeneous access technologies, have been ad hoc to date, resulting in solutions that do not provide well-defined IP connection models, guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), or a standard-ized economic model for interconnect compensation.

The GSMA-defined IP eXchange (IPX) solution was created to address these issues. IPX is a standards-based, secure and quality-enabled managed IP network for delivering interactive multimedia services across any type of service provider’s network, including fixed, mobile, cable, ISPs, ASPs, and Over the Top (OTT).

The IPX specification provides a blueprint for the construc-tion of a next-generation interconnect solution that conforms to four key principles (see below), which the GSMA has deemed vital for a successful IP Interworking solution. 1. Openness to connect all types of service providers 2. Guaranteed quality 3. Cascading payments 4. Extremely efficient connectivity regime – one contract,

many connections.

Provided they follow commonly agreed upon technical speci-fication and use consistent commercial models, a variety of carriers, including wholesale International Long Distance (ILD) operators, IP transit carriers, or GRX operators, can offer IPX services. The GSMA IPX architecture was granted additional legitimacy in late 2010, when it was adopted as a baseline for an interconnect specification composed by the I3 Forum, a consortium of nearly 40 predominantly fixed telecommuni-cations providers.

While the consensus forming around the IPX specification for next-generation IP voice and data interconnection has helped to jumpstart the fledging market, several industry trends and technological advances are now creating additional demand for the secure and guaranteed exchange of multimedia ser-vices. The rapid build-up of LTE-based mobile networks, many to be underlined by an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)-based infrastructure, for example, is expected by industry observers to incentivize mobile operators to form partnerships with IPX providers, potentially accelerating the growth and develop-ment of IPX services. Benefits of IPXA key advantage telecom service providers hold over OTT players is service quality. Quality is paramount to the success of mobile service providers in particular. Achieving end-to-end service quality is not a trivial endeavor, however, as mo-bile operators are challenged by over-the-air packet loss and propagation delay. An IPX-based transit route, accordingly, is viewed by many operators as the only acceptable intercon-nection option that can guarantee service quality.

Potential costs reductions is another benefit. The steady erosion of per-minute long distance charges and the wide penetration of alternate IP termination options offered by OTT providers, threatens the sustainability and growth of carri-ers, such as Wholesale ILD providers, whose business model heavily relies on high-volume origination and termination of voice minutes. IPX offers these carriers the opportunity to create new monetization opportunities, such as charging for guaranteed quality of services or new interconnection op-tions, including transit only interconnection and service-based bilateral and multi-lateral interconnections. To GRX operators, the opportunity exists to create new revenue on top of exist-ing volume-based data interconnection by evolving toward IPX compliance.

GENBAND Intelligent IPX Solution

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Additional IPX benefits are summarized in the following chart:

Benefits to IPX Providers Benefits to Service Providers

Provides value-added services, such as interwork-ing between mobile and fixed operators, by enabling signaling normalization and media transcoding

Enables competitive differ-entiation by delivering new interactive IP services, such as voice, video and mes-saging, over an end-to-end IP network

The ability to increase revenue by charging for guaranteed-quality VoIP ser-vices across fixed, mobile, and OTT service providers

Allows service providers to effectively compete with OTT players by delivering guar-anteed quality of service

Provides differentiated multi-service, multi-lateral intercon-nect over the same intercon-nection backed up by SLA and quality assurance

Obtain both technical and commercial interoperability assurance

Enable secure and seamless interconnections between service providers and appli-cation/ content providers

Ease technical, commercial, and administrative burden to maintain multiple bilateral agreements by having single contract with IPX provider for multiple interconnections

Provides new services such as VoLTE roaming across IMS networks and RCS-e interconnects across islands of mobile networks

Reduces CAPEX and OPEX to maintain multiple tech-nologies to interconnect with peering partners

Offers new session-based rather than minute based services, by providing inter-connects for rich IP-based multimedia services such as VoIP, video telephony, IM, presence, image transfers, and video transfers, etc.

Extends service reachability by interconnecting with a large community of service providers across the globe

Improve their time-to-market to deliver new services backed up with QoS and SLAs

IPX Challenges Interconnecting disparate TDM networks is far simpler than the interworking of IP-based networks because much of the complexity of TDM interconnect has been worked out over recent decades. Moreover, TDM communication is governed largely by a single control protocol and media type (voice). Accordingly, the interworking of IP traffic, which involves multiple control protocols and media types, poses significant challenges. The IPX, therefore, is tasked with overcoming multiple barriers that are not associated with TDM interwork-ing. To overcome these barriers, an IPX provider must have the ability to offer service providers the following:

• Awareness and deep visibility into services being exchanged

• Enforcement of quality of service at each interconnect hand-off

• Ability to assure end-to-end security and quality• Mitigation of interoperability risks• Ability to maintain per-service, per-connectivity-based

SLAs• Correlation of session records for accurate billing and

mediation

The IPX ProxyThe critical element in an IPX network is the IPX proxy. Located at the borders of an IPX network, the IPX proxy’s main functions are to provide security and interoperability, enforce quality and commercial policies, account for all sessions that traverse the IPX provider’s network and provide advanced policy-based routing. To provide these functions in an IPX setting, a market-ready IPX proxy solution should feature strict compli-ance with the requirements of the GSMA IPX specification, as well as offer a resume of extensive deployment in major IPX networks around the globe.

GENBAND Intelligent IPX SolutionGENBAND is a market-leading supplier of next-generation voice and multimedia infrastructure equipment. The GENBAND Intelligent IPX solution enables secure and seamless IP intercon-nection of fixed and mobile voice and multi-media traffic. Unlike solutions that address only a portion of IP interconnect require-ments, GENBAND’s Intelligent IPX solution is a standards-based, single-vendor solution that enables the interworking of traffic from GSM and non-GSM operator networks, TDM-based fixed and mobile networks, and SIP-based VoIP and multimedia networks.


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GENBAND Intelligent IPX Solution Architecture

GENBAND’s standards-compliant, secure, simple and modu-lar architecture enables IPX providers to offer predictable interconnection services with robust security and seamless interworking between myriad devices, protocols and net-works. The scalable commercial offering assists operators in launching new revenue-generating services that are backed up by service level agreements (SLAs) that can be matched against each diverse service flow.

GENBAND’s IPX solution provides unmatched capabilities:

Robust security: Security features include topology hiding, B2BUA, IP rate limiting, TLS, IPSec, SRTP, access control list, dynamic blacklisting, authentication, media filtering, traffic policing, deep packet inspection, logging and auditing.

Any-to-Any Interconnection: Supports interfaces such as C7/SS7, Bearer Independent Call Control (BICC) for legacy mobile interconnects, SIP, SIP-I (with large number of national and international ISUP variants), SIP-T, H.323 and Nb/Nc. This

diversity ensures broad global coverage and service extendibil-ity to any service provider, including TDM, IP, Cable, OTT, ASP or ISP , irrespective of the mobile or fixed origin or destination of traffic. A complete list of protocol and specification support is contained in the following chart.

GENBAND IP Solution Offers Market-Leading Protocol Diversity


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Seamless interworking: The GENBAND IPX solution en-ables seamless interworking between adjacent networks owned by multiple operators for the delivery of voice and multimedia services. It provides a wide range of flexible policies to seam-lessly interoperate multi-vendor and multi-protocol environments utilizing different network addressing technologies, whether IPv4, IPv6 or variations of SIP. It provides IP-to-IP media trans-coding and trans-rating with extensive codec support for fixed and wireless interconnects.

SMART interconnects: In addition to supporting basic QoS assurance mechanisms, such as traffic classification using DSCP marking and CLID transparency, GENBAND’s IPX solu-tion provides Session Management Analytics and Reporting (SMART) Management. SMART Management is designed to monitor, analyze, report and enforce network-wide quality and performance at interconnection points on IPX proxies. It pro-vides extensive service visibility with built-in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor network- and service-level quality at each interconnect hand-off and enforces policies to assure SLAs.

While a properly designed IPX proxy ensures a secure, robust and interoperable IP border, the SMART management solution provides visibility into the traffic that traverses the network edge, adding the analytical capabilities to dynamically modify the call routing behavior based on a combination of business policies, network QoS and interconnect performance. The result is a network that is not only robust and secure, but one that provides the business flexibility needed to deliver high quality services.

GENBAND SMART Management Solution

Intuitive routing: To further improve the quality of inter-connects, GENBAND’s IPX solution ensures route quality, performance, and profitability through global addressing and routing based on criteria such as cost Least Cost Routing (LCR), profitability, percentage distribution, network analytics and service quality and route availability. The GENBAND solution supports standard interfaces to query external route servers using ENUM or SIP Redirect (RFC 4904), enabling the blending of on-board route policies with external route databases.

Simple and sensible operations: A major require-ment of network operators is that new platforms can easily integrate into existing infrastructure and back-office systems, ensuring that Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and Provisioning (OAM&P) costs are minimized. GENBAND’s IPX proxy simplifies operations by providing easy-to-use menu-driven controls to centrally manage, provision, and administer the quality and performance of all interconnection points across the entire network.

Detailed billing and settlement: Ensuring the traffic traversing an IPX provider’s network is properly monetized is a paramount concern. The GENBAND solution produces authoritative session detail records (SDR) for every session type -- (voice, video and IM) – providing more than 100 fields of information that can be utilized for billing, settlement, performance measurement, and troubleshooting. Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): The GENBAND IPX proxy delivers several unique capabilities designed to drive costs out of the overall IPX solution. The solution’s architecture enables operators to build new services without adding new hardware, a critical cost element for operators. GENBAND’s IPX is complemented by a common manage-ment system that further enables operational costs reduc-tion. By delivering the solution on commercial off-the-shelf hardware, with common sparing and inventory for multiple applications functions, the GENBAND IPX proxy offers excel-lent investment protection. Another TCO-reduction feature of GENBAND’s IPX proxy is a media transcoding solution with a centralized pool of DSP resources that can be shared by multiple IPX proxies. This further enables cost reductions by optimizing the utilization of expensive DSP resources.


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Turn-key solution deployment: GENBAND’s state-of-art professional services capabilities complement its IPX solution with skilled personnel to assist IPX providers at every step in the adoption process -- from design through deploy-ment and service management. GENBAND leverages best practices and years of experience in migrating more than 40 million TDM lines to IP to provide turn-key implementation of an IPX solution with end-to-end accountability.

Delivery of new revenue opportunities: GENBAND’s IPX solution creates new opportunities for growth and ex¬pansion by enabling operators to expand their network capabilities and offer new types of services. These new service opportunities, which are highlighted in the following chart, are intuitively segmented into four classes.

Opening up New Revenue Opportunities

Virtualized SBC: Built on the market-leading GENBAND S3TM SBC, the GENBAND IPX proxy solution is unique in sup-porting a virtualized environment, allowing a single system to be segmented into multiple, virtual ones. Each partition can be managed and branded individually, allowing operators to construct a “cloud-based” offering. This capability also removes the requirements for IPX operators to deploy SBCs as dedicated hardware for each service provider interconnect

into the IPX network. Virtualization also enables a unique op-portunity for IPX providers to generate new revenue streams by offering managed and hosted SBC services to service providers and other international wholesale carriers.

GENBAND IPX Solution ElementsGENBAND’s end-to-end, standards-based IPX solution utilizes GENBAND’s S3 Intelligent Session Border Control-ler, G-Series media gateways, C-Series call control and GENView RSM. The S3 SBC provides advanced IP In¬terconnect and IPX proxy functions, such as session management, security, policy enforcement, IP signaling and media protocol interworking and advanced real-time session monitoring and management. The market-leading G-Series me-dia gateways provide interworking and transcoding of voice and multimedia across IP, TDM, fixed and mobile networks. GENBAND’s C-Series call control solutions provide media resource and gateway control, as well as IP-to-TDM signaling interworking (SIGTRAN, SS7, BICC) and advanced voice and multimedia services. Common management is provided by the GenView™ network management system with built in SMART Management solution.

GENBAND’s IPX solution is further differentiated from com-peting platforms when delivered on the GENBAND GE-NiUSTM platform, the industry’s only unified IP switching and networking platform supporting multi-purpose IP solutions. The GENiUS platform integrates all the components – secu-rity, interworking, call control, routing, media handling, and management – in a scalable IPX offering. The ATCA-based GENiUS platform includes and advanced middleware layer (GENWare) and an integrated common management layer (GENView) that enables operational simplicity.


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Extend Your Network without Limits with GENBAND Intelligent IPX SolutionWith the communications industry continuing to evolve at a rapid pace, operators require solutions that can solve today’s requirements and adapt to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Operators pursuing opportunity in the IPX environment require solutions that can assure complex services integrate and operate across multiple technological ecosystems and do so while providing a higher level of service quality than ever before. GENBAND’s Intelligent IPX solution has been designed to meet the needs of IPX providers, enabling the secure, simple, and scalable support of multimedia session connectivity between diverse IP networks.

About GENBANDGENBAND is a global leader of IP infrastructure solutions, enabling enterprise, service and content providers around the world to evolve communications networks through IP innova-tion. The Company offers market-leading Switching, Ap-plications, Networking and Service solutions, with products deployed in over 600 customer networks spanning more than 80 countries. GENBAND is headquartered in Frisco, Texas, and has vast resources in R&D, sales and support spanning more than 50 countries. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.GENBAND.com.


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