Cloud-based SBC: The Right Choice for Long Term Evolution

The cloud-based SBC provides the same capabilities as a traditional SBC, except that it can be deployed on a COTS server.

Virtualized SBC helps operators reduce TCO, accelerate business roll-up and rapidly expand business

Operators can migrate to NFV and re-innovate their communication services by using virtualized SBCs

To support a new generation of advanced IP communication services, operators must virtualize their Session Border Controller (SBC) and deploy it on the cloud. By deploying a cloud-based SBC, operators can reduce investment and operational expenses, accelerate new business launches, and have a new capability: scale the business incrementally to meet business and customer needs.

Ashwin Rana, Senior Product Manager, Alcatel-Lucent

Session border controllers are an integral component of an operator's network. Deployed at the edge of the network, SBC provides capabilities such as signaling and media security, SLA assurance, and legal compliance. These capabilities ensure the control, management, and protection of voice, video, and data communication sessions at the carrier level.

Traditional session border controllers are implemented based on custom platforms and proprietary hardware. Most of these SBCs use network processors and digital signal processors (DSPs) to support firewall, media processing, and transcoding. Traditional SBCs are difficult and costly to scale. Operators statically configure them according to the expected maximum number of users—even if the network does not necessarily grow to that size.

Cloud-based, or virtualized, SBCs offer the same capabilities as traditional SBCs but can be deployed on standard, high-performance, mature commercial (COTS) servers. A cloud management platform such as OpenStack enables operators to deploy COTS servers from different vendors and orchestrate resources to meet the needs of different applications. This flexibility allows operators to gradually scale and evolve their SBCs for user growth, usage increases, or demand changes.

SBC is great for deploying in the cloud. Its functionality can be fully virtualized and run on any Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platform. This shift from traditional to virtualized SBCs has enabled operators to benefit in several key ways. For example, with vSBC, operators can:

Simplify hardware requirements—Virtualized SBCs do not require closed, customized, or proprietary SBC hardware. In the vSBC environment, operators order hardware that can arrive in a short period of time and get it powered up in a matter of weeks without having to spend months. Servers that are deployed on the live network can be quickly reassigned tasks—if they are idle or need to adapt to changes in usage patterns.

Efficient use of resources—Virtualized SBCs can be deployed with standard IT hardware along with other applications. Operators no longer have to reserve spare parts or retrain operators to support different hardware platforms at each site. After migrating to vSBC, operators can still choose to keep spare parts. The difference is that these spare parts can be shared between different applications.

Deploy a scalable, shareable infrastructure—Virtualized SBCs use a common, distributed architecture with centralized management and orchestration capabilities. Operators can achieve new economies of scale by sharing infrastructure across multiple applications.

Increase automation capabilities—Virtualized SBC supports standard tools that automate installation, configuration, and network element provisioning. This standardization can help operators reduce costs and speed up new business launches.

SBC virtualization also allows operators to benefit from important business. One of them is the ability to optimize the total cost of ownership: unlike traditional SBCs, virtualized SBCs can be scaled to exactly the size of the cloud network at deployment time. Operators can deploy SBCs at small POP sites to support thousands of users, or deploy to large offices and data centers to support millions of users.

In addition, the virtualized SBC provides operators with the means to reduce costs and open up new markets using NFV. NFV is hardware independent and flexible to deploy. These capabilities enable operators to adapt their networks to a richer set of services. NFV also provides network automation and more efficient resource utilization. This will enable operators to quickly expand or contract their business.

If properly used at the edge of the network, NFV optimizes and guarantees the deployment of advanced communications services. Operators need to virtualize all network elements to take advantage of the power of NFV. In the process of network to cloud migration, the virtualized SBC is the key, because it handles signaling and media traffic, occupying an important position in all network resources.

Operators attach great importance to large-scale deployment of LTE voice (VoLTE), Web-based real-time communication (WebRTC) and rich media communication (RCS). They hope to increase the use and revenue of data services by expanding the “new communication experience” to millions of users and businesses. This “new communication experience” provides transparent voice, clear video, interactive data sessions and IP message.

But business growth requires more capacity. It also requires an easy and fast way to create, deploy, and scale applications. To solve this problem, network function virtualization and cloud are receiving increasing attention.

By deploying IMS on the cloud, operators can streamline their networks and, to some extent, reduce operational workloads, scale and test new services as needed. Operators can also gain more agility: the cloud can reduce the deployment time of communications services from 12 to 18 months to weeks and reduce the business scaling time from months to minutes.

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