LTE - Diameter Protocol Stack

LTE is the next major step in mobile radio communications and is considered to be a major area of capital expenditure for service providers over the next decade. LTE uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) as its radio access technology, together with advanced antenna technologies. With a data rate of 100 Mbps, LTE is expected to increase the capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks.

Diameter Software Protocol Stack

With the emergence of new technologies and services like wireless broadband, the need for Authorization, Authentication and Accounting (AAA) has known no limits. The base protocol provides basic mechanisms for reliable transport, message delivery and error handling. It is the primary signaling protocol for AAA and mobility management in IMS and finds extensive application for policy and charging in LTE.

One of the advantages of DIAMETER is its ability to support the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), which is commonly used within wireless and point-to-point network. EAP is an authentication framework that supports multiple authentication mechanisms, such as EAP transport layer security ( EAP-TLS) , LEAP, EAP-MD5 and others.

ThinkPalm’s offerings in DIAMETER

Our DIAMETER protocol stack server client framework offers linux based distributed architecture. Following are the major features of our offerings.

• Complies to IETF RFC 3588
• Developed as a flexible library which allows easy integration of other applications
• Developed in ANSI C language in Linux for interoperability with different OS and networks

ThinkPalm also offers a proxy agent between DIAMETER clients and servers. The primary purpose of this agent is to load balance DIAMETER traffic across multiple DIAMETER servers thus increasing the availability and scalability of DIAMETER servers. The client sends Diameter requests to the Virtual IP (VIP) configured on the proxy server. The proxy server distributes a DIAMETER requests to an available server based on the defined load balancing algorithm and the DIAMETER server responds to the client.

Proxy Server Implementation

Diameter Benefits

• Multi-threaded and distributed architecture
• Full capability exchange
• Session termination and extensibility
• Wx-interface between the HSS and AAA server
• Watchdog messages support
• Session initiation and processing
• Session timers