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Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
About This Book......................................................................... 1
Foolish Assumptions.................................................................. 2
Icons Used in This Book............................................................. 2
Beyond the Book......................................................................... 2
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iv Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Introduction
T oday’s real‐time communications (RTC) no longer just
consists of voice calls, but now includes video conferenc-
ing, instant messaging, desktop sharing, team collaboration,
and presence management. Making these different applica-
tions work together seamlessly requires a signaling protocol,
known as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is used
to establish RTC sessions between parties.
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2 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
Foolish Assumptions
It’s been said that most assumptions have outlived their
uselessness, but I assume a few things nonetheless! Mainly,
I assume that you know a few things about RTC and network
security. As such, this book is written primarily for technical
readers — but I explain any technical concepts and spell out
all those wonderful IT acronyms, just in case you’re a non‐
technical reader looking to broaden your mind or become the
center of the social universe to your coworkers.
This icon explains the jargon beneath the jargon and is the
stuff legends — well, nerds — are made of.
The Tip icon points out a bit of information that aids in your
understanding of a topic or provides a little extra information
that may save you time, money, and a headache.
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Chapter 1
Protecting Real‐Time
Communications with SBCs
In This Chapter
▶▶Understanding the role of the SBC in real‐time communications
▶▶Recognizing why enterprises and service providers need SBCs
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4 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 1: Protecting Real‐Time Communications with SBCs 5
••Translating protocols: Different UC solutions may
utilize different audio codecs and other protocols
that aren’t completely supported on both sides of
the session. The SBC knows all these protocols and
can translate between them on‐the‐fly.
✓✓Acting as session traffic cop: The SBC is the gatekeeper
to SIP‐based services in an enterprise or service provider
network. In this role, SBCs perform session admission
control, which is the process of determining who has
access to the network. This makes the SBC the traffic
cop of a SIP network, keeping your SIP highways safe and
orderly and creating and accessing three lists: whitelists,
blacklists, and greylists (discussed in the later section,
“Understanding the Need for SBCs” in this chapter).
✓✓Intelligent Routing and Policy Controls: In larger
deployments, where multiple SBCs are installed at mul-
tiple network borders, the task of individually configur-
ing routing and policies on all SBCs can be tedious and
expensive. An alternative to localized policy control is
further centralization using a master policy server to
automatically propagate a single set of routing and policy
rules dynamically to each SBC on the network.
Understanding the
Need for SBCs
SBCs were initially deployed within service provider net-
works. SBCs ensure that
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6 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 1: Protecting Real‐Time Communications with SBCs 7
✓✓Dynamic pinholing: A pinhole is a port opened in a
firewall to allow an application to access the IP network.
Leaving a port open for an extended period can poten-
tially enable a security breach. SBCs can create pinholes
programmatically and leave them open for only the short
period that a session is active to minimize security expo-
sure. SBCs can then re‐open ports as needed for trusted
applications to send and receive data.
✓✓Topology hiding with B2BUA: A B2BUA system controls
SIP calls by a logical or virtual proxy configured for the
call. This agent sets up the pathways across the network
for both signaling and data. B2BUA causes all signal
and media traffic to run through the SBC and hides the
topology, or architecture, of the network so clients aren’t
shown private IP addresses of servers and devices in the
network. The net result is a network that’s easily acces-
sible to clients for making and receiving calls, but the
“innards” of the network are effectively invisible, which
makes them less vulnerable to attack.
✓✓List monitoring: The SBC’s policy management func-
tion monitors incoming requests and calls, uses rules
to identify people who are and aren’t abusing network
resources, and maintains certain lists including
••Whitelists: People and devices that always have
access to the network
••Blacklists: People and devices that never have
access to the network
••Greylists: People and devices that sometimes have
access to the network
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8 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 2
Identifying the Key
Requirements of an SBC
In This Chapter
▶▶Understanding SIP and call transcoding
▶▶Translating NAT traversal
▶▶Learning the facts about fax and tone detection
▶▶Supporting video
▶▶Ensuring performance, scalability, and resiliency in an SBC
In this chapter, you find out about all the “other” essential
functions of an SBC.
Normalizing SIP
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the primary protocol
that establishes the connection between two endpoints and
closes the connection when the call is finished. At the most
basic level, SIP is the VoIP equivalent of the dialing tones that
directed old‐fashioned analog calls to the right switches and
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10 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
Transcoding Calls
Another one of the SBC’s jobs is to transcode, or change,
codecs as media sessions pass through the SBC. The SBC
knows which codecs are supported on each side of the net-
work border and is required, using a combination of software
(CPU or GPU‐based) and/or special‐purpose digital signal
processors (DSPs), to decode and then re‐encode the voice or
video signal as it crosses the network border.
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Chapter 2: Identifying the Key Requirements of an SBC 11
various VoIP and unified communications (UC) systems.
Low‐ and high‐bandwidth video and voice codecs are
designed differently to work on various devices, such as
HD voice
The sound quality of voice calls in general took a step back-
wards over the years as convenience (mobile) and econom-
ics (VoIP) have caused a movement away from traditional
landline phones. However, high‐definition (HD) voice has
reversed that trend. HD voice can reproduce a greater range
of frequencies at higher clarity (known as a wideband codec)
than traditional narrowband codecs (so called because they
cut off both the top and bottom frequencies normally found in
a person’s voice).
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12 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
Bandwidth restrictions
Sometimes a call is made to someone who’s connected to a
mobile network outside of not only 4G but also 3G coverage.
Other times, a call is made to a person in a home office or a
hotel with a limited Wi‐Fi connection. To address bandwidth
restrictions, there are codecs available that trade fidelity and
audio/video quality for greater compression — thereby using
less bandwidth.
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Chapter 2: Identifying the Key Requirements of an SBC 13
NAT router and to the actual device that’s at the other end
of the session. NAT traversal requires a significant amount of
processing power in the SBC because of the large number
of devices participating in VoIP and other sessions that are
located behind a NAT gateway.
Video Support
Businesses regularly conduct virtual meetings using voice,
video streaming, and other rich‐media communication
services. Still, some challenges remain:
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14 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
Performance, Scalability,
Resiliency
SBCs need to be powerful and robust with extra capacity and
redundancy to handle not only the average number of calls
coming through the system simultaneously, but also to scale
up and handle peak loads. When evaluating an SBC’s per-
formance, scalability, and resiliency, consider the following
factors:
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Chapter 3
Virtualization and Cloud
Optimization of the SBC
In This Chapter
▶▶Defining the virtual SBC
▶▶Recognizing the key functions and benefits of a cloud‐optimized SBC
✓✓Application virtualization
✓✓Desktop virtualization
✓✓Storage virtualization
✓✓Network virtualization
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16 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 3: Virtualization and Cloud Optimization of the SBC 17
✓✓Greater agility: Service providers must be able to
quickly scale their services up or down to meet changing
market demands. They also need to innovate quickly and
get those innovations to market as quickly and easily as
possible. Virtual, cloud‐optimized SBCs allow for services
to be delivered to customers in the cloud.
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18 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 3: Virtualization and Cloud Optimization of the SBC 19
Multiple load balancing methods exist, but for an SBC,
load balancing must have knowledge of session per-
sistence and the performance status of each virtual
instance. More traditional methods like DNS‐based load
balancing or even Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)‐aware
front end load balancing can be used, but they aren’t
optimal because they have issues with encrypted ses-
sions, symmetric Network Address and Port Translation
(NAPT), or possible uneven distribution of load immedi-
ately after scale‐out.
✓✓Resiliency and high availability: Certain attributes
of an SBC are considered table stakes for deployment.
Resiliency and high availability (HA) fit this designation.
The goal of a virtual, cloud‐based deployment would
be to replicate the fault tolerance that’s found in more
traditional hardware appliance deployments. In addi-
tion to the resiliency benefits of optimal load balancing
described in the preceding bullet, a high availability
implementation is also needed to be able to maintain ses-
sion and media continuity in the event of the failure of a
virtual SBC.
Most public cloud environments serve web‐based appli-
cations, so the most commonly used HA solution is the
floating IP address. While this works well for web‐based
applications, it doesn’t meet the stringent requirements
of RTC. A floating IP address solution provides failover
within seconds, but in that duration of time, media con-
tinuity is lost, which is unacceptable. Instead, a high
availability solution based on the OpenStack Allowable
Address pair construct extends the port attribute to
enable the specification of arbitrary Media Access
Control (MAC) address/IP address pairs allowed to pass
through a port, regardless of the subnet associated with
the network.
In practical terms, this means traffic can be sent directly
to both a primary and secondary SBC VNF, enabling fast
data plane failover, thus providing an HA solution that
works for SBC signaling and media requirements.
✓✓Performance at scale: Performance at scale gets to the
very heart of how an ideal SBC is designed and why
moving SBCs to the cloud is a viable deployment model
versus using traditional, proprietary hardware appli-
ances. Performance at scale is possible when SBC func-
tions can be independently allocated to processors.
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20 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 3: Virtualization and Cloud Optimization of the SBC 21
✓✓Network‐wide licensing: A traditional node‐based licens-
ing model that was appropriate for appliance‐based SBCs
isn’t viable in a virtual, cloud deployment.
For a cloud deployment, where SBC VNFs are dynami-
cally allocated, a new licensing model is required. This
is because licensing needs to align with the dynamic
real‐time aspect of being assignable across multiple SBC
instances. By extension, in a cloud deployment, these
licenses need to be available on a network‐wide basis,
since virtual SBC instances remove the construct of a
license tied to a physical device or location.
✓✓Integration with service orchestration ecosystem:
Although service providers could choose to implement
and orchestrate multiple VNFs from a single supplier, in
most situations, service orchestration will involve ser-
vice chaining of multiple services from multiple suppli-
ers. A significant reason to move to virtual cloud‐based
solutions is to break away from single‐vendor solutions
and take advantage of multiple vendors to deliver best‐in‐
class solutions.
As outlined by the European Telecommunications
Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV Management and
Orchestration (MANO) working group, there are three
functional blocks:
••NFV Orchestrator: Responsible for network ser-
vices, global resource management, and overall
VNF life cycle management
••VNFM: Oversees life cycle management of VNF
instances, as well as coordination and adaptation
for configuration and event reporting between NFV
Infrastructure and Element/Network Management
Software (E/NMS)
••Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM):
Controls and manages the NFVI compute, storage,
and network resources
This framework is built around the concept of applica-
tion programming interfaces (APIs) and templates for
configuration of VNFs, yet it also requires a great deal of
interoperability testing and verification to ensure multi‐
vendor deployment.
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22 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 4
Deploying SBCs for
Different Use Cases
In This Chapter
▶▶Supporting unified communications
▶▶Improving the customer experience in contact centers
▶▶Connecting the enterprise
▶▶Securing mobile communications
▶▶Enabling WebRTC
Unified Communications
Gone are the days when enterprise communications meant a
private branch exchange (PBX) switch (you can find more info
on PBX in Chapter 2) and a phone on every employee’s desk.
Today’s employees want it all — voice, video, instant messag-
ing, and web‐based apps — and they want it wherever they
are on whatever device they choose. The world is a mobile
one, and enterprises need to harness the power of UC and
the flexibility of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies to
increase employee productivity, reduce costs, and improve
customer service.
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24 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
The road to UC has been paved with wasted time and money:
time spent on long service engagements and endless interop-
erability testing, and money spent on PBX upgrades and new
equipment. But an SBC can provide a session management
framework (in addition to providing security) for UC and
SIP communications that coordinates PBXs, video services,
business collaboration tools, and a wide variety of IP devices
(smartphones, tablets, and so on), so enterprises can more
easily integrate and create a true UC environment.
Contact Center
The contact center is vital to the success of many businesses
because in a competitive marketplace, high‐quality customer
service is essential. The contact center has evolved from
simply a call center where customer service agents take voice
calls, to a full‐fledged contact center where agents handle
voice, e‐mail, chat, text messages, and video calls. Contact
center efficiency is crucial to customer experience, so agent
productivity and quality control are increasingly important.
The SBC can add value in these areas:
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Chapter 4: Deploying SBCs for Different Use Cases 25
contact center agents provide the utmost quality in cus-
tomer service. In many cases, government regulations
require calls to be recorded for legal reasons and con-
sumer protection as well.
Traditionally, call recording in communications net-
works was done by consuming an extra data port on a
switch to replicate the call data to the recording system.
Consuming an extra data port to record calls doesn’t
scale well in many contact centers that need to record
each call that comes into the system. The SBC simply
replicates the SIP session for the call to send the call data
to the recording system, providing reliable data transfer
and freeing up data ports to allow more incoming calls
from customers.
✓✓Remote agents: Remote or “work at home” agents enable
contact centers to be flexible and scale up or down as
business requires, without the added expense of office
space and facility expansion. Consider, for example, a
retailer that sees dramatically higher sales during the
holiday season. This retailer can add temporary remote
agents to handle peak demand periods. Mobile technol-
ogy allows workers to work out of their homes with
flexible hours, making this arrangement appealing to
workers.
Remote agent configurations do, however, present
some challenges for the contact center. Contact centers
require a scalable solution in which devices don’t need
to be configured and agents don’t need to use a virtual
private network (VPN, see Chapter 1). Security is also a
very important factor with remote agent configurations
because sensitive customer data is exchanged over the
network during these interactions. An SBC eliminates the
need for a VPN with IP phones, yet still provides the nec-
essary security (see Chapter 1).
✓✓Internal transfers: In many cases, calls need to be
transferred to a different agent in another contact center
within the organization. This can often lead to higher
costs and increased security risks if these transfers must
traverse public networks. SBCs can identify internal
transfers and route the call appropriately to ensure
it stays on the private network, avoiding additional
costs and security risks inherent with traversing public
networks.
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26 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
Enterprise Connectivity
SBCs in the enterprise have gained renewed interest as busi-
nesses replace their existing time‐division multiplexing (TDM)
based systems with SIP‐based UC platforms for telephony,
instant messages, presence, and video conferencing applica-
tions. For the enterprise, an SBC is the first line of defense in
the UC system providing cost‐effective and secure connec-
tions to enterprise networks and branch offices. In addition,
enterprises in various industries must comply with regulatory
requirements such as the U.S. Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and industry standards such
as the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards (PCI
DSS). Enterprises must maintain the highest levels of security
to protect their customers’ information and maintain regula-
tory compliance.
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Chapter 4: Deploying SBCs for Different Use Cases 27
Mobile
RTC has changed rapidly from home and office phones to
mobile smartphones. An increasing number of homes no
longer have landline phones, and a growing number of busi-
nesses are replacing their landline phones and even IP phones
with mobile devices.
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28 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
IMS Networks
The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an integrated frame-
work for telecommunications providers to deliver voice,
video, and data using the IP protocol. In recent years, the
widespread deployment of LTE networks has revived the
interest in IMS because VoLTE standards are based on using
IMS for providing voice services over LTE networks. IMS
doesn’t contain an SBC in its architecture, but many IMS func-
tions are already inherent in SBCs.
WebRTC
WebRTC is a new technology that lets you use phone, video,
or text right from a web page. You can also share screens (see
the same web pages or files) and all sorts of things. The SBC
plays an important role in WebRTC including
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Chapter 4: Deploying SBCs for Different Use Cases 29
✓✓Enterprise security: Because WebRTC applications run
in a browser and will likely transmit application data
across the Internet, there is a risk of attacks on enterprise
servers. Consider a case where a customer initiates a cus-
tomer support call from a WebRTC‐enabled web page. The
SBC can secure the SIP network in the contact center by
being placed between the WebRTC application server and
the SIP network at the contact center. The SBC can also
provide session control and management between the
WebRTC server and the SIP server at the contact center.
✓✓VoIP phone calls: In this scenario, consider a VoIP call
from a WebRTC‐enabled web page to a VoIP phone. The
SBC provides
••Security between the WebRTC application server
and the SIP network, as well as session control
••Transcoding between Opus (the default codec
for WebRTC) and G.729 telephony protocols, for
example
✓✓PSTN phone calls: In this scenario, consider a call from
a WebRTC‐enabled web page to a landline phone on a
PSTN. The SBC provides
••Security between the WebRTC application server
and the TDM gateway
••Transcoding and internetworking between the
WebRTC application server and the TDM network
✓✓Video support: Consider a WebRTC‐enabled web page
initiating a video chat with a non‐WebRTC‐enabled IP
video phone. The SBC provides
••Transcoding between the VP8 and H.264 video con-
ference codecs between the WebRTC application
server and the IP video phone
••Protocol internetworking between IPv6 and IPv4
and Secure Real‐time Transport Protocol (SRTP)
and Real‐time Transport Protocol (RTP) for video
media transfer
••QoS and policy control, ensuring the real‐time
media data get network priority
✓✓Lawful intercept: The SBC supports lawful intercept of
both signaling and media data transferred between the
WebRTC server and the destination IP phone.
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30 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 5
Multimedia Matters
In This Chapter
▶▶Meeting customers’ video network requirements
▶▶Deriving business value from SBCs in your video network
Think of the MCU as a funnel that takes in all the video from
the participants’ cameras and combines them into one video
stream that is sent back to them. The gatekeeper or SIP proxy
is like a traffic cop that makes sure all endpoints in the ses-
sion are connected and handles requests (for example, to let
new participants join and others hang up and leave a session).
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Chapter 5: Multimedia Matters 33
work side‐by‐side with firewalls. You can think of an SBC as
an RTC firewall that makes a video system work securely and
efficiently.
Session management
The SBC is the ideal element in a complex network to enforce
call admission control (CAC) on a session‐by‐session basis.
The SBC can perform CAC for multiple unified communica-
tions (UC) and video devices. SBCs can perform QoS priori-
tization (discussed in Chapter 2) to ensure audio and video
traffic passes through the network as efficiently as possible.
CAC helps to provide an optimal end‐user experience by regu-
lating the number of endpoints allowed on the network and
making sure there’s enough bandwidth for each video and
audio stream.
Endpoint interoperability
Many organizations have deployed communication endpoints
created by different manufacturers or software developed by
different vendors, such as Cisco Jabber and Microsoft Skype
for Business. Different video systems may support different
video codecs, so the SBC must be able negotiate with each
device so the same video codec is used, thereby ensuring
interoperability between devices.
Even if all the endpoints in a video call use the same video
codec, the SIP protocol implementations used by Cisco,
Microsoft, Avaya, Polycom, and others differ enough to
require a translation device to make sure the signaling works
to connect to all the devices.
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34 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 6
Determining ROI and Value
in an SBC
In This Chapter
▶▶Getting smart with intelligent routing policies
▶▶Managing policies from a single pane of glass
▶▶Keeping your critical systems up, to keep revenues and
productivity up
▶▶Doing more with less (devices)
▶▶Leveraging virtualization and cloud‐optimization to lower costs
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36 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
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Chapter 6: Determining ROI and Value in an SBC 37
(continued)
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38 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
(continued)
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Chapter 6: Determining ROI and Value in an SBC 39
✓✓Reduced capital expenditures (CAPEX): Simply put, you
have fewer things to buy. For those network elements
that you need for other functionality, you don’t need to
overbuild/over‐specify them to allow capacity for the
SBC functionality that is handled elsewhere.
✓✓Lower operating expenses (OPEX): You can save money
on recurring expenses such as rack space, power, and
cooling with a complete SBC solution — whether physi-
cal or virtual — compared to multiple devices installed in
your data center or telecom equipment room.
(continued)
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40 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
(continued)
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Chapter 7
Ten Reasons to Choose
a Sonus SBC
In This Chapter
▶▶Improving management efficiency and performing under pressure
▶▶Securing the network and ensuring customer experience
▶▶Playing well with others and deploying to the cloud
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42 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
Peak Performance
The proliferation of applications and devices has led to an
explosion in the volume of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
traffic on enterprise and service provider networks. Sonus
SBCs are designed with sufficient capacity to deliver peak per-
formance under different load scenarios. They’ve been tested
under extreme conditions — including simulated large‐scale
Distributed Denial‐of‐Service (DDoS) attacks.
Robust Security
Securing the SIP network is an increasingly high priority
for enterprises and service providers alike. Sonus SBCs are
designed to
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Chapter 7: Ten Reasons to Choose a Sonus SBC 43
✓✓Protect the network from DoS and DDoS attacks, while
maintaining the capability to still connect legitimate ses-
sions (DoS/DDoS attacks are covered in Chapter 1).
✓✓Implement blacklists, greylists, and whitelists (these lists
are covered in more detail in Chapter 1).
Interoperability
Different vendors and different VoIP networks may speak in
slightly incompatible ways when they use SIP (covered in
Chapter 1). This incompatibility can result in calls that can’t
These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
44 Session Border Controllers For Dummies, 4th Sonus Special Edition
Sonus SBCs support all known variants of SIP through SIP nor-
malization (translating between different SIP variants) using
static rules configured on the SBC, or on-the-fly as different
varieties of SIP are encountered by the SBC.
Seamless Scalability
Sonus uses a three‐dimensional approach by separating the
processing functionality of the SBC so individual tasks, such
as transcoding or encryption, can scale up or down without
impacting the performance of other SBC tasks.