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To meet heightened customer demands, mobile networks are moving to 3G and 4G architec-tures. WiFi hotspot coverage is spreading, fiber is reaching more homes and offices, apps are migrating to the cloud, and vanilla voice services are being replaced by rich multimedia capabilities.

Mobility is the new norm, driven by a surge in powerful smart-phones and tablets that are revolutionizing how consumers communicate, socialize and work. Users expect and demand anywhere, anytime connectiv-ity on any device. Facebook, YouTube and other social media are driving network data usage. Traditional carrier business models are under real pressure, with ARPU and PSTN minutes in decline as overall network costs continue to rise.

To survive and succeed, carriers must implement rapid and intelligent changes. Forward-looking operators are working to connect their 3G and LTE/4G mobile networks to data- and entertainment-oriented part-ners and to build new value chains on top of traditional telecom networks.

But to do that, operators also need more information and control at the critical edge of their changing networks. By deploying an intelligent new generation of session border control technologies, operators

can simplify, scale and secure those vital networks.

Network Operator Realities

Let’s start by taking a close look at three crucial realities today’s network operators face.

One: Convergence

Today, the origin and context of communication is highly fluid: IM might become a voice call. A voice call can expand to include video. A one-on-one dialog grows into a conference. Devices are also converging: phones now function as com-puters, computers as phones. Phones are TV’s. Mobile devices are high-end cameras. And mobile devices play video and broadcast capabilities.

To function in this environment, network operators must under-stand how and on what device or devices a service is being consumed. They need seamless interworking capabilities across services, networks and devices. And they must stitch historically distinct applications – including voice, data, video and emerging presence-enabled rich com-munications – into a cohesive whole that keeps them in the delivery value chain.

Two: Quality Expectations

Telco service providers who hope to keep customers in the

face of “Over the Top” (OTT) competition must deliver on one key promise-QUALITY of SERVICE Carriers simply must provide high-quality, integrated services across networks and devices, or else they will con-tinue to lose customers, revenue and profits. Customers expect service availability and simpli-fied billing. Subscribers typically prefer the carrier network over an OTT alternative. So carriers must preserve this relationship, and extend that advantage beyond the traditional voice service.

Three: The Bottom Line

Revenues are falling for many telcos, and may continue to decline. New services devolve from high-value offers to com-modity-like offers all too quickly. So how can operators deliver traditional functions at less cost and secure their position in the evolving value chain?

For many, the answer lies at the network edge, where a new generation of intelligent session border control technologies is reducing costs and improving performance and subscriber satisfaction.

Intelligence at the Edge

Modern session border control-lers (SBC) provide secure session management at the network edge. But the security capabili-ties of traditional SBCs – topol-

ogy hiding, NAT transversal, access and call admission controls – while still needed are simply not enough. To ensure security, quality and cost-efficiency, the first line of defense – the network border – must intelligently and efficiently handle incoming and outgoing traffic.

That requires insightful policy enforcement at every stage of processing a session, an ability to dynamically adapt policies based on network performance, and simplification in deploy-ment, troubleshooting, and life cycle management to bring op-erational excellence. Let’s take a closer look at how an intelligent SBC can do all three of these crucial realities.

Insightful Policy Enforcement

Intelligent SBCs perform deep packet inspection and provide granular policy enforcement points to take smart decisions in ensuring robust security, seamless interworking, and intelligent session management. Policy decisions should not just be based on static and quasi-static engineering and business rules, but also on real-time insights gained from a holistic understanding of network realities.

Security

Network threats multiply with the addition of each new device,

How to Simplify, Scale and Secure YourIP Communication Network:Leveraging Intelligent Session Border Control

Change is the constant in modern communication, and lately, the pace and intensity of that change is accelerat-

ing. Networks continue to converge, with ubiquitous broadband evolving from a “value add” service to be-come a basic expectation for productive consumers.

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application or border. Video, IM, VoIP and other multimedia services are targeted for intru-sion. DoS and other malicious acts are adapting to emerging communications applications. Network operators must deploy intelligent traffic screening with a deep awareness of packet contents. Adaptive security leverages dynamic blacklisting of suspect sources, rate limits on drop packets and automatically adjusted admission policies to proactively protect the network.

An intelligent SBC acts as the smart sentry at a network’s edge, protecting against attacks and service theft, ensuring pri-vacy and supporting regulatory compliance. Granular controls and multi-stage policies allow carriers to manage session variables and to ensure policy enforcement, SLAs and quality.

Session Management

Inadequate routing can cause session delays, intermediate hops or loop-around incomple-tions, and those problems can seriously degrade quality and customer satisfaction. Intel-ligent routing goes beyond the traditional criteria of called/calling party numbers, trunk group and other static measures to examine a more robust set of variables, including destination availability and capabilities, cost and profitability, performance and service type. Advanced SBCs provide policy enforce-ment, simplified IP-to-IP session management and programma-ble session routing. They allow

operators to logically link traffic management policies and end devices, while monitor-ing usage and applying policy at network ingress, transit and egress points. Intelligent rout-ing at interconnect borders support traffic engineering, dynamic route hunting, adap-tive routing by response code, and route selection by peering priority, service type and level, performance, cost and profit-ability.

Normalization

Interconnects tend to grow in number and complexity as telecom networks evolve, and as core networks are converted to IP and are connected to peering entities. Network cores work best when ap-plications, devices and other networks are normalized at the edge. Traffic should be inspect-ed, understood, converted and routed at the edge, so that every internal system does not deal with every potential possibility.

Fortunately, the intelligent SBC acts as the Rosetta Stone, the translator, at the critical net-work edge. They allow carriers to deploy intelligent controls to seamlessly normalize and inter-operate with multiple vendors and devices across a range of networks, standards, protocols and media formats. An intelligent SBC also provides the SIP transparency needed to ensure seamless interworking between partners and suppli-ers in access and interconnect networks.

Holistic Evaluation with Dynamic Adaptation

To manage a network, you must first understand that network. Network operators must have clear service layer visibility if they hope to manage disparate voice and data traffic converg-ing into multi-media sessions. They must know what is hap-pening in their networks, if and why customers are unhappy, and where they are making or losing money.

Holistic Visibility

Troubleshooting is complex and time consuming in a distrib-uted IP network. Carriers need simple-yet-sophisticated tools to extract, view and manage real-time sessions and network performance. Many use costly 3rd party monitoring solutions to gain adequate visibility into their networks.

Intelligent session analysis by SBCs offers a holistic alterna-tive, evaluating the quality of multimedia traffic, interconnect performance, route profitability, node performance and resource utilization. Intelligent SBCs also provide robust reporting and alarming at the network and service layers without adding the cost or complexity associ-ated with external probes, multiple boxes or 3rd party services.

Dynamic Adaptation

To ensure quality, operators need more than visibility. They

must take feedback from the network to understand network performance such as media quality, network latency, call completion rate, average call duration, post dial delay, route availability, and route profit-ability; and then translate that insight into policies that ensure quality, performance and profit-ability. Intelligent SBC solutions deliver these critical capabilities by providing automated feed-back loop and dynamic adapta-tion of policies such as route priorities, and admission control criteria..

Simplification

Simplification is the next crucial step in managing the modern network.

Deployment

Intelligent SBCs are uniquely capable of meeting the chang-ing needs of NGN and all-IP network architectures. They can be deployed as stand-alone purpose-built platforms, or as integrated multi-application solutions designed to minimize management and integration complexity. Common hardware, middleware and management allow intelligent SBC platforms to support virtualization, mul-tiple network roles and many applications. That deployment flexibility translates into measur-able operating, integration, training and inventory savings.

Operations

Intelligent SBCs simplifies

system integration and reduces the cost of operations, admin-istration, maintenance and provisioning. Easy-to-use web-based provisioning systems and solution-oriented configuration methods can reduce deploy-ment time and workloads.

Standards-based API interfaces and FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Administration, Performance, and Security) capabilities ensure smooth integration with back office systems, and in-service software and platform upgrades ensure five 9’s service availability at all times.

Scale

Today’s networks must handle more codecs and session types, mobile VoIP and greater overall traffic volumes – scale and variations that create complex traffic engineering challenges. Intelligent SBCs meet these requirements, without requir-ing hundreds of boxes, through innovative traffic management solutions – such as load balanc-ing, virtualization, network wide session capacity management, and centralizing core network functions such as routing.

Evolution

Forward-looking network managers can supplement intelligent edge solutions with robust service and technical support, proven NGN and IMS capabilities, and sophisticated transformation and deploy-ment toolsets. A reliable service partner will offer a number of

critical maintenance and sup-port services including business and solution-level consulting, integration assistance, man-aged spares, managed services, training and multi-level support options.

Intelligent Partnership

Network operators can harness the power of intelligent edge technologies by forging alli-ances with key solution partners.

GENBAND is a leading source of session border control innova-tions. The company’s S3™ Intelli-gent SBC supports convergence and transformation to IP in both fixed and wireless networks, while delivering carrier-class security and performance.

Operators can deploy feature-rich S3s to enable IP Intercon-nect, IPX (IP Exchange), hosted unified communications, SIP business trunking, VoLTE and rich communications capabili-ties. Through a combination of adaptive security, insightful policy enforcement, any-to-any seamless interworking, and ad-vanced session routing capabili-ties, the GENBAND S3 SBC brings service providers advanced levels of intelligence, flexibility and performance at IP network borders. Accompanying the S3 is the market leading Real Time Session Manager (RSM).

The S3 ensures a secure and robust interoperable IP border, while the RSM provides visibility into the traffic that traverses the network edge and adds the

analytical capabilities to dynami-cally modify the call routing behavior based on a combina-tion of business policies, net-

work QoS or subscriber usage patterns. The result is a network that is not only robust and secure, but one that provides the business flexibility needed to deliver highly profitable services.

Available on a carrier-class, highly-redundant commercial off-the shelf platform, this new generation of intelligent SBC has been field-proven through millions of sessions deployed in over 500 global deployments – both for access and interconnect solutions.

GENBAND provides flexibility to deploy S3 on a standalone 2U rack mount server or as an integrated ATCA blade on the GENBAND GENiUS platform, the

industry’s only unified IP Switch-ing and Networking platform supporting multi-purpose IP solutions.

Conclusion

Carriers are struggling to meet the demands of service and network convergence, device proliferation, mobility and service portability. Astute managers know they must adapt their networks at the edge to ensure quality, extend reachability and increase profitability. The good news is that a new generation of intel-ligent session border control can do the job. Intelligent SBCs can protect the network core, apply insightful policies, enhance cus-tomer satisfaction and improve the business bottom line. By creating an intelligent edge, car-riers can secure their position in the communication value chain of the future.