The functional completeness of MARBEN™ Diameter (support for Authentication and Accounting as both client and server) makes it suitable for use in all IMS equipment needing Diameter.

The core of the MARBEN™ Diameter product is a robust and high performance software implementation of the Diameter base protocol (RFC 3588, RFC 3589 and RFC 3539) and Credit Control Application (RFC 4006).

MARBEN™ Diameter protocol stack is complying with the 3GPP requirements for the :

• Sh/Dh authorization/authentication interfaces (3GGP TS 29.328 and TS 29.329 ),
• Cx/Dx authorization/authentication interfaces (3GGP TS 29.228 and TS 29.229),
• Rf offline charging interface (3GGP TS 32.225 and TS 32.299)
• Ro online charging interface (RFC 4006, 3GGP TS 32.225 and TS 32.299).

For all these Diameter interfaces, it can play both the client and server roles.

Access to each of these interfaces (Sh, Cx, Rf, Ro, CCA) as well as the Diameter Base Protocol is offered through a set of dedicated high level object oriented APIs in C++ and Java. These APIs have been designed after the JAIN model well known by Service Delivery Platform developers. They are thus easy to learn and use.

MARBEN™ Diameter protocol runtime stack encapsulates the Diameter base protocol and Diameter application communication logic by completely handling:

• Peer transport connection management.
• Routing of Diameter messages.
• Stateless and stateful session management.

MARBEN™ Diameter has been designed to retain the main characteristics of the Diameter protocol, and the today advanced computer architectures, namely:

• Extensibility through an AVP description dictionary mechanism that can be modified and tolerance to unknown AVPs, which are passed to user application as they are received.
• Reliability by handling peer failover/failback, by implementing a flow control mechanism to regulate diameter requests and to ensure safe behavior under heavy traffic and by the support of the SCTP reliable transport protocol.
• Security by supporting both IPsec and the TLS secure transport layer as well as processing of Diameter security AVP.
• Scalability by a configurable portable threading mechanism that allows benefiting from multiprocessor architectures and adapting to traffic requirements.
• High Availability (HA) support for active/standby mode for ensuring service operation continuity for a customer application using Diameter in a clustered environment.

In the IMS world which is aimed at facilitating emergence of new services, extensibility and openess allow for quick and low cost adaptation to such new services. In addition to Reliability and Security, Scalability and High Availability are essential because IMS services implementers have to face the challenges of real-time access, responsiveness, high traffic, high availability and no data loss.

Easy integration has been a goal. This is a challenge because it has to balance accommodation to diverse customer environments and minimization of integration work. For this purpose, access to the transport layer is done through de facto standard socket transport interface. MARBEN™ Diameter runtime stack can run on top of any TCP or SCTP layer offering a socket transport interface with very little work.
The same objective has driven HA support. MARBEN™ Diameter approach to High Availability is to be HA framework agnostic because it may have to fit customer environments that have their own HA solutions. MARBEN™ Diameter is interfacing with the HA framework services through a generic API validated on Software Availability Forum (SAF) compliant HA framework.
Similarly, operation and management interface has been kept simple while providing the functionalities expected for telecom software that runs under strict operational constraints:

• Provisioning of stack parameters, like peer, realm, routing tables.
• Statistics collection and management described in the standard SNMP MIB format for quicker integration with SNMP agents and/or managers.
• Dynamic trace and logging.

The MARBEN™ Diameter product is packaged as a library that can be easily fitted in a C++ or Java application development environment. The product is currently available for RedHat Linux, Sun Solaris, HP-UX. Other platforms will be supported shortly, ask our sales team for full details.