Next Gen Servers - Delivering Resiliency & Reliability

Back to back user agent servers are redefining reliability matrix and helping the enterprise community move ahead on next generation architecture

Delivering true next generation capabilities for the enterprise community, Back to Back User Agent (B2BUA) servers play an important role in today’s IMS (IP based Multimedia Subsystems) environments. And most importantly, recent releases of 3GPP IMS specifications indicate that an increasing number of IMS network element servers, are adopting B2BUA server architecture.

It is very important to note that most of the IMS driven services, developed on Application Servers are usually based on B2BUA frameworks. The reason for this is that value added services are usually session based, and feature capabilities that go beyond basic call proxying.

As far as the enterprise class services is concerned, IMS servers are required to support for QoS features in order to provide differentiated service quality and emergency call support. Next generation B2BUA servers allow writing applications that perform call preemption, call queuing and even negotiated call quality degradation in overload conditions.

As IMS was designed as a network for converged telecommunications, application services riding on this infrastructure require better technology handling. In order to connect to a wide array of clients with different sets of capabilities that move between different networks, B2BUA Servers provide solutions for IMS-related interoperability, inter-domain communication and call handoff issues.

Servers With High Availability

Whether it is an enterprise or SME, most of the organizations are today looking at high availability as one of the key criteria for making that all important technology implementation call. The issue of high-availability is very important for IMS and NGN SIP servers.

 

But if we talk about high availability, the term high-availability in and of itself is a bit ambiguous, in that it is subjective relative to the type of service offered. Core network servers are expected to deliver 99.999% availability, which translates to five minutes downtime per year. Service providers are also expected to provide service continuity, which means that in case there is server unavailability, active calls which were managed by the unavailable server will not get disconnected.

B2BUA servers are intrinsically helpful here because they maintain a stateful connection (dialogue) to one or more end-points and have an ad hoc logical association between these separate call corners.

And in order to maintain a highly-available B2BUA server, the server should have a typical run-time state duplication technologically driven mechanism that enables server redundancy for the enterprise. Moving forward more and more servers are set to deliver true next generation ready architecture and driving profitability for the enterprise community.