Ribbon DG Session Border Controllers For Dummies PDF
Ribbon DG Session Border Controllers For Dummies PDF
Ribbon DG Session Border Controllers For Dummies PDF
Save money
with SBCs
By Lawrence C. Miller
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Session Border Controllers For Dummies®, 6th Ribbon
Special Edition
Published by
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774
www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted
under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of
the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department,
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online
at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the Rest of
Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier, and related trade dress are trademarks
or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other
countries, and may not be used without written permission. Ribbon and the Ribbon logo are registered
trademarks of Ribbon Communications, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective
owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
For general information on our other products and services, or how to create a custom For Dummies book
for your business or organization, please contact our Business Development Department in the U.S. at
877-409-4177, contact [email protected], or visit www.wiley.com/go/custompub. For information about
licensing the For Dummies brand for products or services, contact BrandedRights&[email protected].
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
We’re proud of this book and of the people who worked on it. Some of the
people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Project Editor: Key Ribbon Contributor:
Carrie Burchfield-Leighton Daniel Teichman
Acquisitions Editor: Katie Mohr Production Editor:
Editorial Manager: Rev Mengle Magesh Elangovan
Business Development
Representative: Sue Blessing
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 1
About This Book.................................................................................... 1
Foolish Assumptions............................................................................. 2
Icons Used in This Book........................................................................ 2
Beyond the Book................................................................................... 2
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
CHAPTER 5: Multimedia Matters................................................................. 31
Video Should “Just Work”.................................................................... 31
Adding Value to Video with SBCs...................................................... 33
Session management.................................................................... 33
Endpoint interoperability.............................................................. 33
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Introduction
T
oday’s real-time communications (RTC) no longer just
consists of voice calls, but now includes video conferencing,
instant messaging, desktop sharing, team collaboration,
and presence management. Making these different applications
work together seamlessly requires a signaling protocol, known as
the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is used to establish
RTC sessions between parties.
Introduction 1
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Foolish Assumptions
It’s been said that most assumptions have outlived their useless-
ness, 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 points out information that you should commit to your
non-volatile memory — along with important dates.
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.
This information tells you to steer clear of things that may cost
you big bucks, are time suckers, or are just bad SBC practices.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding the role of the SBC in
real-time communications
Chapter 1
Protecting Real-Time
Communications
with SBCs
R
eal-time communications (RTC) in modern businesses
includes phone calls, video conferencing, chat, text mes-
saging, desktop sharing, and team collaboration. In this
chapter, you learn how a session border controller (SBC) enables
and secures enterprise and service provider RTC infrastructure.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
real-time communication sessions for both enterprises and
service providers. An SBC performs the following functions:
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
• Dealing with SIP variants: SIP has a lot of variants based
on different vendor implementations. An SBC can translate
these variants between devices (a process known as SIP
normalization, covered in more detail in Chapter 2) so calls
get through with all their features intact.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
for deploying an SBC is security. VoIP (as well as other session-
oriented applications) is an application that, by its very nature, is
exposed to devices and networks that are out of the control of an
enterprise or a network provider. VoIP isn’t like traditional teleph-
ony in which a very highly circumscribed set of devices, protocols,
and private networks are involved in the process of placing and
carrying calls. In the old days when you placed a phone call, the
call was placed on an approved device and carried across the pri-
vate phone company network.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
of RTC is typically secured by Transport Layer Security (TLS) or
Internet Protocol Security (IPsec), while the media layer is
secured by Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP).
»» 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 potentially 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 exposure. 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 accessible 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 function
monitors incoming requests and calls, uses rules to identify
people who are and aren’t abusing network resources, and
maintains certain lists including
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
IPv6 IS (FINALLY) HERE
The IP variant (IPv4) that has powered the Internet for as long as most
of us can remember has an issue. IPv4 uses a 32-bit address space,
which means it’s limited to only about 4.3 billion addresses — and it
just ran out of available addresses (not literally just now; it happened
in 2015).
IPv6 increases the address space to 128 bits, which means that
there are now 340,282,366,920,938, 463,374,607,431,768,211,456
possible addresses (that’s “340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonil-
lion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion,
374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand
and 456” — seriously).
This, in turn, causes other issues. For example, not all networks can
natively support IPv6. When two clients want to communicate and
one is on an IPv4 network and the other on IPv6, something needs to
get in the middle and help them communicate. An SBC resolves these
issues in two ways:
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding SIP and call transcoding
»» Supporting video
Chapter 2
Identifying the Key
Requirements of an SBC
A
session border controller (SBC) does much more than
just security. In fact, many in the industry say that it’s the
security that gets customers interested, but it’s the other
functionality in an SBC that makes the sale. This other function-
ality is all about SBCs making Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
calls and real-time communications (RTC) sessions work in
situations where they may otherwise not work and, beyond that,
SBCs simply make VoIP and RTC services work better.
In this chapter, you find out about all the “other” essential func-
tions 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 across private
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
phone networks. SIP is critical to the capability of disparate
network topologies from different vendors to be able to commu-
nicate with each other.
An SBC must be able to speak all the different dialects of SIP and
do on-the-fly translations in both directions. So, if a call is cross-
ing a border between a system using Dialect X and another system
using Dialect Y, the SBC must find the parts of Dialect X and Y that
don’t quite match up and convert them back and forth as the call
moves across the SBC. It’s not rocket science in concept, but it’s
hard to do, and the best SBCs make the whole process transparent
and seamless.
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 network 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 net-
work border.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
in a videoconferencing environment) — are in use in 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 backwards
over the years as convenience (mobile) and economics (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).
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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 lim-
ited 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.
You may not want to default to these low-fidelity codecs all the
time, but sometimes they’re necessary over at least part of the
call’s path. An SBC sitting between network segments can rec-
ognize this situation and transcode to and from lower bandwidth
codecs when required. This situation is much better than rely-
ing on the VoIP clients themselves to do this kind of calculation
upfront, especially because not all clients support all codecs.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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:
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
An SBC can provide video proxy services, NAT/firewall services,
protocol conversion and transcoding, Quality of Service (QoS)
monitoring and more. SBCs can also perform protocol translation
between SIP and H.323 as well as H.264, H.263, G.722, and many
other video and audio protocols.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Defining the virtual SBC
Chapter 3
Virtualization and
Cloud-Native SBC
I
n this chapter, you learn how virtualization and cloud-native
design works and how your organization can benefit from a
virtualized or cloud-native session border controller (SBC).
»» Application virtualization
»» Desktop virtualization
»» Storage virtualization
»» Network virtualization
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Communications systems can also leverage virtualization tech-
nology. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) helps service
providers design, deploy, and manage network services by sepa-
rating network functions from hardware devices, so they can run
in software. This process removes the need for you to purchase
dedicated hardware such as routers, firewalls, and SBCs, among
others.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
associated with rolling out new services, as they can easily
try out and modify new service offerings to meet the needs
of their customers.
»» 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-native SBCs allow for services to be delivered
to customers on private or public clouds to achieve greater
agility.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
management domain and will automatically receive its IP
networking information, such as network interface IPs,
default gateways, and domain name server (DNS) IP
addresses.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Multiple load balancing methods exist, but for an SBC, load
balancing must have knowledge of session persistence and
the performance status of each virtual instance.
»» 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-native design is to replicate the fault tolerance
that’s found in more traditional hardware appliance deploy-
ments, but without the overhead of multiple appliances. In
addition to the resiliency benefits of optimal load balancing
described in the preceding bullet, a high availability imple-
mentation is also needed to be able to maintain session and
media continuity in the event of the failure of a virtual SBC
instance or cluster.
High availability is especially difficult to achieve in cloud
deployments because most public cloud environments were
designed to serve web-based applications, so the most
commonly used HA solution is to use a 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 can’t provide failover within seconds,
meaning media continuity is lost, which is unacceptable. One
alternative is to use a high availability solution based on the
OpenStack Allowable Address pair construct that 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 tradi-
tional, proprietary hardware appliances. Performance at scale
is possible when SBC functions can be independently allocated
to processors. Turning on feature capabilities like encryption,
interworking for IPv4 to IPv6 or Real-time Transport Protocol
(RTP) to Secure RTP (SRTP), and SIP header manipulation have
no impact on session performance. It also means the SBC is
capable of handling sustained denial-of-service (DoS) attacks
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
or registration floods without negative impact on performance
or call quality.
When extending this to the cloud deployment model, a
cloud-native design means the adoption of a microservices
architecture to deliver performance at scale. With a microser-
vices architecture, the SBC breaks out “functions” or specific
tasks into separate virtual instances. These discrete instances,
when taken together, function as an SBC, yet they still allow
optimization of each function. For example, the call control
function scales based on the call rates/calls per second, which
is a different measure than how the transcoding service needs
to be optimized based on use case, such as access versus
interconnection SBCs.
»» Integrated analytics: A virtual SBC needs to provide two
essential functions related to analytics. The first is a critical
feedback loop of traffic utilization data needed to properly
manage the VNF instantiation. The second is the key data
needed for monitoring and troubleshooting both the RTC
application and the virtual SBC instance itself.
Integrated analytics begins with a lightweight data agent
running with the SBC VNF to forward resource and traffic
utilization metrics to a VNF manager or a service orchestra-
tion system. With these metrics, it’s possible to know when,
or why, to create or tear down an SBC VNF. This feedback
loop enables on-demand elasticity. However, resource
utilization statistics are not only for use by VNF managers/
service orchestration systems. Real-time measurement of
resource utilization for each SBC VNF instance is also used
for load balancing within a cluster of SBC VNF instances.
Application and VNF metrics are also used for monitoring
and troubleshooting. Information traditionally captured in
event logs, Call/Session Detail Records, trace logs, and
telemetry are all valuable inputs for monitoring an applica-
tion or platform troubleshooting.
Being able to fit virtual SBCs into business support systems
(BSS) and operations support systems (OSS) solutions is a
critical requirement to successfully deploy cloud-native SBCs.
»» Network-wide licensing: A traditional node-based licensing
model that was appropriate for appliance-based SBCs isn’t
viable in a virtual, cloud deployment.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
For a cloud deployment, where SBC VNFs are dynamically
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 service chaining
of multiple services from multiple suppliers. A significant
reason to move to virtual cloud-native 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:
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Supporting unified communications
»» Enabling WebRTC
Chapter 4
Deploying SBCs for
Different Use Cases
S
ession border controllers (SBCs) play a role in many differ-
ent types of environments and configurations such as uni-
fied communications (UC), contact centers, Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP) trunking, mobile and IP Multimedia Subsystem
(IMS) networks, and interworking with Web Real-Time
Communications (WebRTC). In this chapter, you discover the
unique requirements and challenges for each of these use cases.
Unified Communications
Gone are the days when enterprise communications meant a pri-
vate 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 messaging, and
web-based apps — and they want it wherever they are on what-
ever device they choose. The world is a mobile one, and enter-
prises need to harness the power of UC and the flexibility of Bring
Your Own Device (BYOD) policies to increase employee productiv-
ity, reduce costs, and improve customer service.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
CIOs are looking to UC and cloud-based services to meet the rising
demand for real-time communications (RTC), yet a fundamental
barrier to UC adoption is a lack of interoperability between the
vendor-specific voice, video, and messaging systems that exist in
most enterprise networks.
While SIP was meant to break down many of those barriers, even
SIP-based systems face their own issues and often require sig-
nificant interworking and transcoding to provide acceptable lev-
els of interoperability. Thus, most enterprises fall short of a truly
unified model of communications and collaboration. Such a model
allows users to consistently consume rich media services regard-
less of the underlying PBX, application server, or end-user device.
The road to UC has been paved with wasted time and money: time
spent on long service engagements and endless interoperabil-
ity testing, and money spent on PBX upgrades and new equip-
ment. But an SBC can provide a session management framework
(in addition to providing security) for UC and SIP communica-
tions that coordinates PBXs, video services, business collabora-
tion 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.
As you move more services and applications into the cloud, the
SBC-based session management framework unifies cloud-based
services with your on-premises based enterprise communications
to ensure a rich, easy-to-manage UC experience.
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 qual-
ity control are increasingly important. The SBC can add value in
these areas:
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
»» Call recording: Contact center managers use call recording
as both an evaluation and training tool to ensure contact
center agents provide the utmost quality in customer service.
In many cases, government regulations require calls to be
recorded for legal reasons and consumer protection as well.
Traditionally, call recording in communications networks 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 dramati-
cally higher sales during the holiday season. This retailer can
add temporary remote agents to handle peak demand periods.
Mobile technology 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 necessary security (see Chapter 1).
»» Internal transfers: In many cases, calls need to be trans-
ferred 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.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
One case to consider is a video kiosk in a store where a
customer can make a video call to ask for assistance that
is routed from a contact center to a remote agent. In a
non-SBC environment this setup is complicated because
both voice and video data could travel across multiple
networks, requiring each border traversal to be secured.
An SBC provides the necessary security, call routing, and
load balancing features to make this type of transfer secure
and cost efficient.
Enterprise Connectivity
SBCs in the enterprise have gained renewed interest as businesses
replace their existing time-division multiplexing-(TDM) based
systems with SIP-based UC platforms for telephony, instant
messages, presence, and video conferencing applications. For the
enterprise, an SBC is the first line of defense in the UC system
providing cost-effective and secure connections 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 regulatory compliance.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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 businesses are replac-
ing their landline phones and even IP phones with mobile devices.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
IMS Networks
The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an integrated framework
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 architec-
ture, but many IMS functions are already inherent in SBCs.
WebRTC
WebRTC is a 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
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
»» 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 customer
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
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Meeting customers’ video network
requirements
Chapter 5
Multimedia Matters
F
rom the boardroom to the browser, video and audio confer-
encing have become essential elements of everyday business
communications for an increasingly mobile workforce.
As business users move beyond simple voice calls to more sophis-
ticated forms of real-time communications (RTC), your Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP) network needs to handle more than just
audio and its related audio codecs (see Chapter 2).
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
without jitter or distortion. But making video and audio “just
work” can be a real challenge. For example:
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 session are con-
nected and handles requests (for example, to let new participants
join and others hang up and leave a session).
This example of a simple video system works well when all the
endpoints use the same protocols, but what happens if the call
must pass through a network firewall or one of the endpoints
uses a different protocol? You can configure firewall rules to allow
traffic to pass through, but this can compromise security. In any
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
case, the simple video system breaks down when you have devices
with different protocols and the video traffic must pass through a
Network Address Translation (NAT) gateway or network firewall.
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 communications (UC) and
video devices. SBCs can perform QoS prioritization (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 regulating the number of end-
points 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 dif-
ferent vendors, such as Cisco Jabber and Microsoft Teams/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.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Implementing intelligent routing policies
Chapter 6
Determining ROI and
Value in an SBC
Y
ou’re all hyped up. You’ve done all your research, and you
know the benefits (Chapter 1) and services (Chapter 2) you
can get from a session border controller (SBC). Now it’s time
to pitch the investment to your CFO (also known as your CF-“No”).
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Intelligent policy engine capabilities enable organizations to
implement policies, such as
Challenges
The airline faced functional and expense-related issues with its legacy
telecommunications systems. Specifically, the airline needed to
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
• Improve employee productivity
• Maintain voice security
• Improve customer experience across a variety of real-time
communications (RTC) applications and devices
Solution
The airline installed Ribbon SBCs and a Ribbon Policy Server. The SBC
and policy server addressed several issues:
Results
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
If you have a large network — or if your network grows over
time — you can further simplify SBC management with a cen-
tralized policy server. In this scenario, you perform your ini-
tial configuration and any future policy changes one time in one
place — on the master policy server. Your changes are automati-
cally distributed across the network to all your SBCs.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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 physical or virtual —
compared to multiple devices installed in your data center or
telecom equipment room.
Challenges
(continued)
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
(continued)
The retailer deployed a Ribbon SBC and Policy Server (PSX) in two
data centers to provide a centralized dial plan for all stores. The
retailer leveraged Ribbon to develop an installation plan, perform
configuration, and develop and implement a test plan. The initial
deployment was successfully defined, designed, tested, and imple-
mented in just a few weeks.
Results
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Improving management efficiency and
performing under pressure
Chapter 7
Ten Reasons to
Choose a Ribbon SBC
W
hether you’re an enterprise using Voice over Internet
Protocol (VoIP) or unified communications (UC) or a
service provider offering VoIP or UC services to your
customers, your choice of session border controllers (SBCs) is
integral to your real-time communications (RTC) architecture
and the success of those services. In this chapter, I give ten great
reasons for you to choose a market-leading Ribbon SBC solution
for your RTC needs.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
only need to make changes once — in a single place. Your changes
are automatically pushed to all your SBCs — which increases effi-
ciency and reduces the risk of missing an SBC or making a critical
error (and generating a resume updating event).
Peak Performance
The proliferation of applications and devices has led to an explo-
sion in the volume of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) traffic
on enterprise and service provider networks. Ribbon SBCs are
designed with sufficient capacity to deliver peak performance
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 enter-
prises and service providers alike. Ribbon SBCs are designed to
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
»» Protect the network from DoS and DDoS attacks, while
maintaining the capability to still connect legitimate sessions
(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 (see Chapter 1).
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
This incompatibility can result in calls that can’t be completed
or are degraded in some way (or perhaps missing some function-
ality). The SBC plays a huge role in understanding the different
variants of SIP.
Ribbon 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 vari-
eties of SIP are encountered by the SBC.
Seamless Scalability
Ribbon uses a three-dimensional approach to scalability by sepa-
rating 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.
These materials are © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.