White Paper Abstract:
Session Border Controllers (SBCs) are physically located at critical network interconnection points and the SBC selection and deployment criteria are a crucial matter. It is always a major undertaking to define criteria that ensures the proper security, achieves the desired QoS, and supports interconnect and interoperability with other networks, and performance, security, and reliability expectations of the SBC implementation, as well as the planned scale, must be fully addressed.
Today, many service providers have deployed, or are considering, standalone SBC appliances. Unfortunately, these appliances act as clients of the routed infrastructure, and must redirect VoIP traffic over multiple Gigabit Ethernet links—which adds jitter and delay to the sessions, and creates traffic management inefficiencies. These standalone SBC devices often lack the capacity to support 10 Gigabit Ethernet links, and are therefore unable to efficiently support the ever-increasing volume of IP video services. In fact, to the only way to scale appliance-based solutions is to add more appliances to the network. This appliance “proliferation” results in increased design and management complexity and also results in increased total cost of ownership.