SIP network border elements are the cornerstone for the network’s service fulfillment and completion when communicating with other networks (peering and network backbone access). Because these elements perform a wide range of critical tasks their performance, scalability and availability are of high importance. Thus, improvement of these capabilities and offloading of some of the tasks to external, purpose built, components will increase ROI of the border elements. Radware’s SIP Director provides the following features and benefits for border elements.
Scalability and Performance
SIP services must be capable of scaling to accommodate growing volumes of users and calls. However, SIP application state management and the need to support TCP and TLS transport, introduces service scaling challenges. By optimizing SIP resource selection across application servers, core network entities and border elements, SIP Director improves SIP service performance and QoS. It achieves this by employing IP and SIP call/messaging load balancing along with TLS/TCP off-loading and acceleration, connection reuse and aliasing. SIP Director streamlines the utilization of SIP resources, enabling unlimited and scalable call handling capacity. In addition, SIP Director makes it possible to meet dynamic load and peak usage requirements by off-loading and managing SIP traffic between locations, while enabling transparent server addition, for tuned service capacity management and a highly economical “build-out as you grow” approach.
High Availability, Fail-over and Disaster Recovery
Radware’s SIP Director provides optimal call completion, recognizing application failures and overcoming them at any call state. SIP-based call establishment, responsiveness, completion and continuity are critical for SIP deployments in large scale networks. To ensure high availability of SIP services, SIP Director performs advanced health, resource and call handling capacity checks across all SIP aware entities. By intelligently and accurately routing SIP traffic across server clusters, SIP Director guarantees SIP service fulfillment and optimal call completion. SIP Director is a fully redundant solution with internal local fail-over and global traffic redirection and off-loading and backup between locations, thus ensuring carrier-grade resilience and multi-site disaster recovery.
Security
Deploying SIP services in the network exposes its core and edge entities to security threats such as network DoS/DDoS attacks, SIP level floods and other SIP vulnerabilities. SIP Director provides integrated SIP-service and network security protecting operators’ SIP servers, core and edge SIP network elements against attack. SIP Director provides signature and behavioral based DoS/DDoS security delivering “zero-minute, zero-touch, zero false-positive” detection and mitigation of SIP layer floods, worms and SIP protocol exploits (e.g., buffer overflows, SQL injections).