IP Softswitch, VoIP & NGN Deployment | ControlSwitch™ Interconnect CS-IC

Communication service providers face a complex set of challenges. Worldwide deregulation has increased the level of competition, forcing service providers to find new approaches to attract and retain profitable customers. The new competitive environment and the rise of new modes of Internet communication have reduced the profitability potential of the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). To succeed, service providers must overcome the technical and financial hurdles of moving to increasingly efficient packet-based technologies and services while still leveraging existing circuit-switched voice networks.

In an environment replete with vendors offering proprietary vertical solutions, Veraz Networks is committed to providing open and interoperable solutions consistent with the intent of various standards bodies including Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and other proponents of distributed architecture principles and systems concepts.

In order to maintain a competitive edge via reduced costs and increased service revenue, carriers around the world are looking to transition their current legacy voice services to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This migration requires an innovative, open-standards packet-switched network that is flexible and can enable rapid deployment of new revenue generating services while reducing operating costs. Veraz's CS-IC is the perfect platform to achieve this and beyond.

The CS-IC’s unique ability to mediate between various packet protocols such as MGCP, H.323, SIP, H.248 and global PSTN signaling protocols (SS7, PRI, CAS R1/R2) and variants gives service providers the flexibility to maximize existing resources and deliver a wide variety of enhanced services via any type of network. Additionally, Veraz provides a gradual migration strategy that leverages an existing service investment and provides a clear path to an all-IP based IMS network.

The open-standards, multi-protocol, multi-services platform from Veraz enables new services to be implemented dynamically throughout the entire network; that is, service providers can deploy new services and solutions without the overhead of running multiple disparate networks or incurring downtime to reconfigure the network. Any additional processing capacity is added using Common Off-the-Shelf (COTS) computing platforms.

CS-IC includes a service delivery platform based on programmable, configurable and dynamic loading of XML service scripts. This empowers our customers to design, develop, deploy, activate, and tailor their service offerings on the fly, thus gaining control of their market differentiation.

The rapid creation of a wide range of differentiated enhanced services can be delivered from both ControlSwitch and third-party application servers.

The CS-IC provides a true best-of-breed solution set for meeting all of the requirements of the complete next-generation multi-tiered reference model. The CS-IC design allows for high scalability in granular increments -- yielding an optimized solution for both initial and large-scale deployments. For instance, service providers can choose to centralize system management, billing subsystem, service logic and routing, and distribute call control and signaling to various regional centers. This ensures that an additional investment to support traffic growth is aligned with revenue growth without confronting scalability limits to their business.

Regardless of the distribution of ControlSwitch elements across multiple locations, Veraz provides a single point of management for configuration, provisioning, and system monitoring, including realtime alarms, performance statistics and traffic reports. In addition, CS-IC provides a single view of the Call Detail Records (CDR) and provides end-to-end call tracing as an invaluable troubleshooting tool.

Various elements of the Veraz CS-IC can be distributed geographically for scaling and redundancy, i.e., a primary element may be located in a city and can be backed up by the secondary element located in a different switching center even in a different city.

CS-IC has proven openness at all interface layers to enable service providers to rapidly interoperate with new vendors of media hardware and application servers. Additionally, CS-IC is a core element in solutions that incorporate products from the Veraz Open Solutions Alliance (VOSA) partnership program. Veraz offers numerous field-deployed solutions interoperable with specialized products from VOSA partners. Therefore, service providers can quickly exchange traffic with other service providers and deploy services from Veraz and its partners for increasing their revenue.

Veraz CS-IC incorporates realtime collection of detailed statistics used for VoIP traffic prioritization and bandwidth utilization control. The network and application layer statistics collection system in combination with the Policy Engine enable advanced Quality of Service (QoS) Management and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) design. SLAs can be customized -- per customer, per interconnection partner, per service, etc. The QoS element enables carriers - network-wide and in realtime - to automatically obtain feedback and take corrective action to maintain custom SLAs.

CS-IC element management system offers a dashboard into the service provider’s network. However, for service providers with a large investment in existing backoffice systems including provisioning, billing, and network operations, CS-IC offers many open interfaces including PL/SQL and XML for provisioning, SNMP for network management, and text-based CDRs for billing. CS-IC can also be deployed with backoffice traffic monitoring systems that require call status tracking in realtime. Alternately, this application can also be used by operators wishing to record traffic patterns in realtime.

CS-IC provides security features to enable service providers to prevent malicious attacks on their network and ensure that their customers’ assets are fully protected. Some of the features include topology hiding to hide internal network and customer details, access control lists, “denial of service” attack prevention, and far-end and near-end NAT traversal to avoid NAT/Firewall complications.

The market for mobile voice services is characterized by growth and constant churn in the customer base. To support this, wholesale network service providers and/or wireless service providers need to frequently add tandem switching and trunk capacity to connect new and existing Mobile Switching Centers (MSCs) and Gateway MSCs (G-MSCs) with each other. The investment required by traditional TDM solutions to support this need is disproportionately high and is unsustainable in a market with declining prices and margins. CS-IC provides a next-generation solution to this problem by delivering a highly efficient, distributed “virtual mesh” tandem switching solution, along with substantial bandwidth savings and toll-quality voice over packet networks.

CS-IC delivers Service Broker functionality based on a unique and open architecture such as MSF and 3GPP. This provides realtime transactional integration for significantly reduced integration cost, and it provides a bridge to web services. The architecture also enables: integration of best-of-breed service applications from multiple vendors; services scalability from 1-to-N application servers; service execution in a heterogeneous environment (i.e. SIP, INAP); co-existence and quick delivery of services between legacy and NGN; new service business models delivery; and the fastest services customization without the burden and costs involved in forklift upgrades.

ControlSwitch™ Interconnect (CS-IC)