Nokia announced its next-generation "Session Border Controller" software, offering service providers dramatically higher levels of performance and security for their cloud-native deployments.
Nokia SBC acts as the gatekeeper at the edge of the network, preventing cyber-attacks, IP-bandwidth overload and unauthorized access attempts launched against communication interfaces from devices and other peer networks.
The new software provides enhanced capabilities to help customers better manage and protect media and signaling streams within and across their networks, ensuring high-quality, uninterrupted delivery of voice and video.
Extensive testing by Miercom, an independent organization specializing in networking and communications product testing, revealed that Nokia's newest cloud-native SBC delivers performance on par with hardware-based SBC solutions, and far surpasses that of other comparable cloud-based products the firm previously tested.
"Nokia's cloud-based SBC software demonstrated impressive levels of performance, security and scalability in our testing, delivering high signaling and media plane performance, powerful encryption/decryption capabilities, strong DoS and DDoS protection, and more," said Rob Smithers, CEO of Miercom. "It offers service providers a safe, reliable and affordable way to migrate their session border controllers to a cloud environment."
Key findings from Miercom's testing report revealed that Nokia's new SBC software delivered carrier-grade performance for the most demanding signaling and media plane use cases when implemented as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). The software also provided complete mitigation of DDoS attacks without any degradation in voice or video call handling and quality; and it also delivered high-density transcoding, encryption, decryption and other compute-intensive tasks, ensuring high-quality, private connections for voice and VoIP calls.
In addition, the software demonstrated high resiliency in failover tests under a high call load (800 calls per second with Transport Layer Security) with 100 percent successful handover of established calls. Is also supported the highest per-VNF capacity for software-based media and signaling compared to other pure-cloud SBC competitors.
"All service providers deploying IP-based communications services need session border control to protect the network at the boundaries. We're the only vendor to offer a cloud-native SBC solution that is field proven in large communication service provider networks with tens of millions of subscribers," said Bhaskar Gorti, president of Applications & Analytics at Nokia. "The validation by Miercom underscores our ability to deliver world-class products that help customers ensure the safety, reliability and performance of their IP networks."
Nokia SBC enables communication service providers to cost-effectively control, secure and manage access, peering, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), VoLTE and over-the-top (OTT) applications within a single software package, and helps deliver a high-quality voice and video experience for end users.
Designed for cloud deployments, Nokia's SBC software is fully virtualized and supports OpenStack and VMware telco-cloud environments, and is currently used by more than 90 service providers globally, including 12 of the top 25 mobile network providers.
