MARBEN DiamX Router

With Growing Mobile broadband use, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are facing the challenge of the increasing demand of data services that runs anywhere, any time and all the time. "All the time" becomes all the more important since the cost of a network outage is not only the lack of revenue during the interruption but is also large indemnities and long term impact on the reputation that was built over time with expensive marketing campaign. To cope with such challenge of the five nines on the voice but also on data services, MNOs have to duplicate their equipment among their core network and make them communicate through a robust signaling network. Diameter has been the elected protocol for such communication, Diameter Routing Agent (DRA) is the traffic and congestion manager and Diameter Edge Agent (DEA) is the gatekeeper.

Marben offers a software solution dedicated to run on any hardware or cloud infrastructure for Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to cope with such new challenge of engineering Diameter traffic deeply into the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) Network. MARBEN DiamX Router is the enabler of a fluid Diameter traffic between the key components of the IMS based network architecture namely HSS, AAA Server, PCRF, OCS on one side and PCEF, MME, PDN Gateway and SGSN on the other side thanks to its combination of Diameter Edge Agent (DEA), Diameter Routing Agent (DRA), Subscriber Locator Functions (SLF) and Interworking Function (IWF).

MARBEN DiamX Router solves:

• Diameter Routing Agent (DRA) and Diameter Edge Agent (DEA) roles: MARBEN DiamX Router can relay and proxy any Diameter sessions through static rules, based on the original host and destination realm but also information within the message itself. It includes the Diameter S6a interface between the MME and the HSS for the roaming;
• Interworking Function: MARBEN DiamX Router offers standards based SS7 MAP to diameter interworking function to connect legacy network elements. MARBEN DiamX Router also offers other interworking functions such as RADIUS and CAMEL;
• Flexibility required for Roaming: its DEA role is adaptive to deviations from other implementation running into the visited mobile network;
• Scalability: as nicely built software, MARBEN DiamX Router can scale and work from a virtual container to fully redundant and distributed servers, from few to hundreds of thousands messages per second;
• Interoperability: Marben has ten years' experience of running its Diameter stacks in the field in front of all major vendors;
• Cost challenge: Marben can adapt its sales model from a TPS, Unlimited based licensing model to a royalty based model.

Use cases

Use Case 1: This Message Transformation use case describes how a message and its AVPs can be manipulated. In this use case, Message Transformation is used to achieve routing based on realm using following rules:

1. If originRealm = "realm1" then replace destinationRealm with "hss1realm".
2. If originRealm = "realm2" then replace destinationRealm with "hss1realm".
3. If originRealm = "realm3" then replace destinationRealm with "hss2realm".

Use Case 2: This Session Binding use case describes how to manage sessions from different Diameter Applications which are linked together. In this use case, Rx Session is bound to Gx using Session Binding information(Subscription-Id=XYZ).