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In traditional real-time communication, voice sessions have a one-to-one relationship between signaling and media (S1:M1), either with or without transcoding. A traditional, integrated signaling and media network element (integrated SBC, or I-SBC) effectively meets the requirements of this type of session. I-SBCs often run on custom hardware and are scaled horizontally to provide a deployment its required capacity.
As services evolve to support multimedia sessions, the traffic becomes more dynamic. The next generation communication may have one session with no media (S1:M0), or one session with multiple media (S1:Mn) relationships, with or without transcoding. Effective handling requires considering the following three planes independently:
Signaling plane: for more IM presence status
Media plane: for video, MSRP, multiple streams per session
Transcoding plane: for transcoding / transrating / transizing of audio or video
The D-SBC architecture breaks the main SBC functions into separate services and assigns them to separate clusters. A cluster consists of multiple discrete nodes supporting one main function, such as signaling or media, with all nodes providing the same service. A virtual environment supports multiple clusters simultaneously, each providing a specific SBC function:
These clusters coordinate with each other and are linked by the S-SBC using the Ribbon Media Control protocol on a per-call basis. A cluster contains one or more SBC redundancy groups (RGs).
An SBC redundancy group (RG) consists of one or more SBC SWe node instances. All the instances in an RG must have homogeneous resource allocation, configuration and personality. All RGs in a cluster must be of the same SBC type (signaling SBC or media SBC), which dictates the cluster type such as a signaling cluster or a media cluster.
The D-SBC architecture distributes functions throughout the network to utilize network resources effectively.
The advantages of decomposing include:
Example: Signaling components can be scaled if the traffic requires high signaling such as presence without the media component. Similarly, traffic with high media requirements, like video calls, can be served by instantiating more instances in the media cluster. Traffic that needs high transcoding requires instantiating more instances in the transcoding cluster.