Cloud-native Nokia Session Border Controller sets benchmark for performance and security in fixed, cable and mobile networks

2 November 2017

• Nokia's field-proven Session Border Controller (SBC) software enables service providers to deliver secure, high-quality voice and video services in hybrid and virtualized network environments

• Enhanced SBC robustly defends against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and unauthorized access without impacting the customer experience

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today 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 version announced today 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.

New features and capabilities of the latest Nokia SBC software release include:

• Built-in Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring to alert the operator to quality issues

• Lawful interception enhancements to meet different regional regulatory requirements

• Cloud scaling automation with Nokia CloudBand Application Manager (CBAM)

• Support for Optimal Media Routing (OMR) and Session Recording Protocol (SIPREC)

Extensive testing by Miercom, the leading 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. 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)

• Provided complete mitigation of DDoS attacks without any degradation in voice or video call handling and quality

• Delivered high-density transcoding, encryption, decryption and other compute-intensive tasks, ensuring high-quality, private connections for voice and VoIP calls

• 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

• Supported the highest per-VNF capacity for software-based media and signaling compared to other pure-cloud SBC competitors

Rob Smithers, CEO of Miercom, said:

"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. It offers service providers a safe, reliable and affordable way to migrate their session border controllers to a cloud environment."

Bhaskar Gorti, president of Applications & Analytics at Nokia, said:

"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. 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.

Availability

Nokia new Session Border Controller release 18.0 is expected to be available at the end of November 2017.