SIP-based communications and multimedia services delivered directly to subscribers have become mainstream offerings, serving enterprise and residential customers alike. Session border controllers play a critical role in these access environments by enabling the service provider to deliver services across NAT and firewall devices while ensuring Quality of Service, core network security and regulatory compliance.
To address the specific needs of session control in an access environment, Sonus SBCs support the following:
- Performance capacity to deal with the demands of NAT
- Prevention of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, service theft and fraud
- Topology hiding
- SIP normalization and interworking between enterprises
- Regulatory support of Emergency Call Handling and Lawful Intercept
Performance Capacity for Network Address Translation
Subscriber access to the current set of IP-based communications services--including traditional dial tone, IP Centrex, IM, UC, or call center applications--are provided via a wide range of interfaces such as a PC, an IP phone or through an adapter to a traditional telephone; almost universally, there is also a requirement to pass traffic through a CPE-based firewall/routing device providing Network Address Translation (NAT) to the device. Sonus has estimated that traversing NAT can increase the number of SIP messages by 4X or more and therefore creates significant load on the SBC. Sonus SBCs offer industry-leading performance density to ensure that service providers can painlessly scale to meet these demands.
Robust Security
Sonus SBCs provide superior protection against DoS attacks, registration storms and malformed packet attacks as confirmed by independent third-party testing firms such as Miercom. Sonus SBCs deliver a robust set of security features including:
- Traffic policing
- Topology hiding
- Access control
- Rogue RTP protection
- Signaling and media encryption with TLS, IPSec and Secure RTP
- SPIT protection
- Split DMZ
