A Communication Service Provider (CSP) LTE network serves the markets in eastern and western regions. 4G signaling traffic are handled by HPE Gen8 BareMetal servers. To address growth in signaling traffic, the CSP is moving towards deploying a scalable and a secure solution to support various use cases for DIAMETER signaling applications. Local and roaming traffic would be handled separately. A DIAMETER Routing Agent (DRA) handles local traffic and policies. A DIAMETER Edge Agent (DEA) exposes public IP addresses for integration with roaming partner. A DIAMETER Security Application, with stateless and stateful countermeasures, mitigates malicious attacks for inbound and outbound roamers. A User Database Repository (UDR) supports Full Address Based Resolution of subscribers. A Subscriber Binding Repository (SBR) provides session and database binding for mobile users. Insight on DIAMETER traffic is made possible using integrated DIAMETER Intelligence Hub (iDIH). HPE Gen 10 Rack Mount and Blades servers will provide the required processing, memory, and storage resources of the hosting environment. Site, regional and geographic redundancy are incorporated for service availability and fault resiliency.
Subcontracted by Oracle Global Communications Business Unit, CELENIUM SME was charged to lead the end-to-end solution design and implementation. Starting with a series of technical workshops, he captured customer requirements and developed a virtualized DIAMETER Signaling Router (vDSR) Solution Architecture and Engineering Design (SAED). After aligning on the end goals for the network and deployment architecture, he sized the system HW components and placement of Virtual Machines (VMs), using the network service capacity demand, along with the hardware (HW) and application resource profiles.
The hosts and guest VM interfaces required to support the services for local and roaming signaling interfaces, management and replication traffic were determined. The resulting number of hosts and guests determined the network utilization such as the subnets required for the service delivery, management, replication, and uplinks to Provider Edge (PE) routers. A Network Architecture and Planning Design (NAPD) documented the vDSR infrastructure, application subnets, NTP and SNMP addresses, and physical connections within cabinet and external to the PE.
The SAED elaborated on the intra-cabinet networking at a high-level as well as the details from the ports at Layer-2 to Layer-3 aggregation at cabinet switches, Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) traffic separation, as well as SCTP and TCP sunny and rainy-day use cases. It provided logical connectivity between the signaling routers, local and roamer peer nodes. The SAED outlined the deployment process starting with media preparation, networking, remote server access, infrastructure creation, application installation and feature activation, application configuration and testing.
To materialize the design, he developed the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) of the project, the NAPD template capturing customer information required for configuration and integration. He authored several Methods of Procedures (MoPs), as outlined in the deployment process, the Test Plans for the systems, applications and network switches. In addition, he authored the traffic migration strategy. He configured lab and production L2/L3 switches including Cisco 93180 and HPE 6127. The L3 cabinet switches were integrated with PE switches using BGP, VRF, VRRP and OSPF. Then, prototyped Infrastructure deployment, Application Configuration, Feature Activation, and DIAMETER Configuration. Due to the scale and size of this project, he mentored engineers though lab prototyping sessions to hand them over the production deployment.
Network built, problem solved!
“Ahmad is an excellent engineer and a solution design architect whom I’ve had a great pleasure working with on several 4G and 5G projects and proud to have him on my team. Ahmad brings breath of knowledge and experience in many different aspects of the industry. He puts careful attention to details, communicating and articulating complex solutions with stellar diagrams and neat documentation that make the organization look good, and the entire implementation clear and easy to understand by the team and the customers, who highly appreciate the details and the fine documentation. Customers like the fact that they can talk to an expert like Ahmad who knows the subject matter, and can delve deep into technical details to ensure the proposed solution is well understood and how the implementation is going to work.“
Hanan Dadon, Sr. Manager Consulting, Architecture & Solutions at Oracle