Oracle’s Session Initiation Protocol Trunking
Solution
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Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking services
are among the most transformative technologies to
emerge in years. More than just low-cost alternatives
to primary rate interface (PRI) trunks, they can help
businesses become more agile and productive.
Now offered by incumbent and alternative service providers, SIP trunks provide
enterprises with access to a wide range of cloud-based communications services. These include everything from basic telephony to rich unified communications (UC), high definition audio conferencing and videoconferencing, contact center services, and business process outsourcing.
Oracle’s SIP trunking solution is designed to enable the hyper-connected enterprise—a new type of organization that uses communications to attain never-before-achieved levels of customer engagement, employee productivity, and competitive advantage. Oracle’s SIP trunking solution connects users and devices across SIP trunks, secures all real-time interactions, and controls the user experience.
SIP trunks are typically offered as a virtual service that shares a common access circuit with other Internet Protocol (IP)–based network services, such as private Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks or internet services. By converging voice and data services, enterprises can consolidate infrastructure.
SIP trunks are offered in more granular increments than PRI circuits and can be easily adjusted to meet changing business conditions. Enterprises that operate in multiple locations can consolidate their trunks into central data centers to optimize efficiency. In fact, Sorell Slaymaker, vice president of communications architecture at Unified IT Systems, reported in his 2013 presentation “Building the Business Case for SIP Trunking” that businesses can reduce their telecom costs by 50 percent or more by migrating to SIP.
Most service providers offer simplified pricing by bundling advanced features along with some amount of Direct Inward Dialing (DID) numbers and long-distance minutes as part of the fixed monthly SIP trunk service fee. Enterprises can easily connect to multiple service providers over SIP and route their outbound traffic to optimize costs. Site-to-site traffic can be carried over the enterprise MPLS network, eliminating Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) fees.
Oracle’s SIP trunking solution is
designed to enable the
hyper-connected enterprise—a new type
of organization that uses
communications to attain
never-before-achieved levels of
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Critical SIP Trunking Implementation Challenges
As with any new technology, SIP trunks present some implementation challenges.Connectivity
SIP specifications are less rigid than traditional International Telecommunications Union (ITU) telecom specifications. The signaling interface between a SIP trunk service and on-premises communications systems may be implemented in different ways or may include optional SIP functions.
These variations result in connectivity issues, such as access denial and even system crashes. Media formats may also be incompatible between the SIP trunk provider and UC systems. Each interface may support different codecs, and certain in-band signals may require translation, including Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) and fax signals. These issues can prevent successful connections.
Security
SIP trunks use IP networks to transport real-time communications (RTC), thus exposing the IP communications infrastructure, services, and applications to a wide range of threats and service quality problems, including denial of service (DoS) attacks, viruses, and IP telephony spam. Attackers can leverage public domain scanners and
reconnaissance tools to identify and exploit security weaknesses from inside or outside the enterprise. Attackers may try to manipulate signaling or media flows, disrupt network infrastructure, listen in on confidential exchanges, or commit service theft.
Conventional IP security devices are not designed to control RTC and thus do not address their unique security and service quality concerns.
Limited Control
Because SIP trunks are virtual interfaces, they are flexible enough to connect with multiple service providers for outbound call connectivity—something that was either impossible or prohibitively expensive with PRI circuits. Enterprises need to control and route sessions across multiple SIP trunk interfaces to optimize cost, availability, quality of service (QoS), and other critical service objectives.
Session quality issues can crop up anywhere in multivendor IP communications infrastructures, making them difficult to diagnose and troubleshoot. This problem is compounded when troubleshooting must occur in real time. Powerful tools are needed to isolate and diagnose problems in these end-to-end systems.
SIP TRUNKING BENEFITS
• Accelerate SIP trunk deployments with a turnkey solution and implementation services
• Eliminate project risk by leveraging expertise and proven solutions from a market leader
• Securely connect to cloud-based IP communications services for increased business agility
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Oracle’s SIP Trunking Solution
Combining Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller; Enterprise Operations Monitor, troubleshooting, and analytics software; and Oracle Professional Services, Oracle’s SIP trunking solution is designed to connect, secure, and control real-time voice, video, and UC sessions at IP network border points.
Typically deployed in data centers and remote offices, Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller is designed to resolve multivendor, multiprotocol connectivity issues;
safeguard user confidentiality and privacy; protect communications systems; and control service quality and integrity across end-to-end IP communications networks. Forming a demarcation point between the enterprise and service provider networks, Oracle’s industry-leading session border controller enables IT staff to rapidly isolate, diagnose, and remedy RTC problems.
Oracle Enterprise Operations Monitor’s real-time monitoring, troubleshooting, and analytics software provides unprecedented insight into UC networks, enabling
enterprises to quickly and securely deploy SIP trunks, reduce operating costs, increase user satisfaction, and prevent service fraud.
Oracle’s comprehensive implementation services provide a robust deployment service that streamlines implementation of Oracle’s SIP trunking solution. It combines project management, preinstallation planning, onsite implementation, and postimplementation remote consulting. Oracle Professional Services engineers bring industry experience and best practices to the SIP trunking design and implementation. They also ensure that deployment complexity and risk are reduced while desired operational and business objectives are met effectively and on schedule.
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Key Solution Features
The following subsections describe some key features of Oracle’s SIP trunking solution.
Connect
Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller provides extensive protocol normalization, media fix-up, and transcoding functions to mitigate connectivity issues and improve service availability. It supports a wide variety of protocol configuration options that can be enabled or disabled. Powerful header manipulation rules (HMRs) solve more complex interoperability challenges by providing the ability to add, modify, or delete headers or parameters in SIP messages.
Transcoding capabilities adapt UC systems to service provider SIP trunk interfaces and optimize bandwidth utilization. Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller can convert sessions between many compressed and uncompressed formats. An optional hardware assist enables large-scale media transcoding.
Secure
Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller and Oracle Communications Fraud Monitor are designed to protect IP telephony and UC infrastructures, services, and applications, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability. They prevent fraud and service theft, and they guard against malicious attacks, system overloads, and other service-impacting events.
Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller’s unique architecture enables it to deliver the QoS required for RTC sessions and maintain strong security. It uses dedicated network and signal processing resources to detect and block DoS attacks while continuing to forward valid sessions. In real time, Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller fully terminates, inspects, and reoriginates signaling and media associated with each session to protect against protocol fuzzing, eavesdropping, hijacking, and other attacks.
6 Control
Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller is able to monitor SIP trunks and route sessions based on a range of parameters, enabling enterprises to control the flow of traffic across borders and optimize costs, availability, and QoS. Stateful high availability (HA) features support 1-to-1 enterprise session border controller (E-SBC) configurations that can protect organizations from access circuit outages and service disruptions. The E-SBC can fail over all active sessions while preserving complete session state, which provides seamless business continuity.
Oracle Enterprise Operations Monitor monitors key performance indicators, metrics, and alerts on every session flowing through the network—in real time and at great scale. It can identify problems before they are visible to users. Deep drill-down capabilities enable users to isolate problems across multivendor networks, provide root cause analysis, and solve problems quickly.
Figure 2. Oracle Enterprise Operations Monitor monitors end-to-end communications sessions and provides real-time analysis that enables IT staff to solve complex problems quickly.
Flexible SIP Trunk Deployment Options
Oracle’s SIP trunking solution is highly scalable and tightly integrated to support a wide range of enterprise deployment topologies. Oracle recommends connecting E-SBCs directly to the edge router that terminates a SIP trunking service and in parallel with an enterprise firewall. The E-SBC may also be deployed in series with the firewall, if required by corporate security policies.
For organizations that do business in multiple locations, Oracle’s SIP trunking solution supports centralized, distributed, and hybrid SIP trunk topologies. Oracle offers
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locations and appliance-based products that scale to the needs of a centralized trunking architecture. Oracle Enterprise Operations Monitor leverages probe capabilities built into Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller to collect the real-time traffic information it uses for monitoring and analysis. This provides a highly efficient and easy-to-manage solution for distributed and centralized topologies.
Oracle Professional Services are available in 166 countries. Experienced Oracle engineers have helped deploy some of the largest distributed SIP trunking networks in the world.
The following tables summarize the features and benefits of the components that make up Oracle’s SIP trunking solution.
Table 1.Oracle Enterprise Session Border Controller
Feature Benefit
Advanced DoS and overload protection Maintain high level of service availability SIP protocol normalization Accelerate SIP trunk deployment H.323-to-SIP protocol interworking Protect investments in legacy infrastructure
Optional 1-to-1 HA Provide seamless recovery from equipment or network failure
Least cost routing Minimize costs
QoS-based routing Optimize service quality
Table 2. Oracle Enterprise Operations Monitor
Feature Benefit
Simple, intuitive GUI Reduce customer care costs Quickly and easily isolates users and
network issues
Improve incident response time In-depth root cause analysis for signaling
and media issues
Analyze past problems Lightweight deployment with no
provisioning required
Implement rapidly
Automatic alias detection Integrate with existing infrastructure Real-time fraud detection option Minimize loss due to fraudulent activity Self-learning Minimize monitoring efforts
8 Table 3. Oracle Professional Services
Feature Benefit
Project management Ensure all installation phases are fully managed and all tasks are completed for each installation phase according to the customer’s schedule
Preinstallation planning Optimize SIP trunk deployment to meet the customer’s operational requirements
Onsite implementation service Ensure successful and seamless deployment into production
Optional 1-to-1 HA Ensure seamless recovery from equipment or network
failure
Least cost routing Minimize costs
Postimplementation remote consulting
Provide ongoing support during service rollout
Conclusion
To succeed in today’s hypercompetitive business environment, communication
companies must become hyper-connected enterprises—using communications to attain
never-before-achieved levels of customer engagement, employee productivity, and competitive advantage. Oracle’s SIP trunking solution is designed to enable this type of enterprise.
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