SCTP: A Standard But They Are Not All The Same

Service providers are struggling to provide a highly reliable transport mechanism across all network types that maintains the Five 9s reliability that telecom networks demand.

There is renewed urgency to address signaling-based threats to wireless communications networks and service providers are struggling to protect their networks. As the number of LTE subscribers grows so does the number of connected devices and as the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to snowball vast numbers of devices need to connect to the core network. The underlying transmission protocols, such as SCTP, need to be able to support the huge number of simultaneous connections trying to access the network simultaneously and security in the network is more important today than ever before. Today’s interconnected networks are vulnerable to hijacking via insecure links or rogue network nodes. Application vendors are worried that they can unknowingly allow the network to be compromised when presumably ‘secure VPNs’ invisibly transport threats within packets.

Added to that, with LTE subscriptions estimated to reach four billion by 2020, service providers are worried that Diameter signaling spikes will affect their ability to maintain Five 9s network reliability and create bottlenecks in LTE performance impacting a whole range of applications with valuable and timely data such as charging and billing systems.

This exponential growth in signaling demands a secure, reliable, robust and high performing transport and that transport is SCTP. Whilst it is a convenient and seemingly economical transport solution, service providers and application developers are increasingly frustrated that the free Linux-supplied SCTP (lksctp) for SIGTRAN and Diameter is simply not up to this task.

Built to meet the demands of today’s LTE, Diameter, SIGTRAN and IoT standards, Adax SCTP/T enables service providers to achieve signaling reliability by performing vigilant in-service quality monitoring of the signaling link, detecting degradation of link quality at very short, programmable intervals and then providing redundancy via an enhanced version of multi-homing for redundancy and fault tolerance.

Adax SCTP/T achieves levels of signaling performance, security and capacity that are unsurpassed in the industry providing:

• Up to 10,000 simultaneous associations for maximum connectivity
• Secure authentication to prevent packet injection, hijacking or accidental disconnection
• Protocol implementation in the OS kernel for accurate timer control and quick recovery
• In-service monitoring of links detects degradation in 20mS
• Enhanced multi-homing provisioning options for improved fail-over robustness and redundancy

Overall Adax SCTP/T delivers the improved levels of reliability and security that LTE Core Networks, IoT and M2M needs without compromising performance or capacity. Without Adax SCTP/T continuous run-time security, network connections will be vulnerable to fraudulent packet injection and hijacking, network reliability will be compromised and applications that rely on valuable and timely data will under-perform.

Download the Adax SCTP/T datasheet pdf here.