BIG-IP DTM License
F5 BIG-IP DTM or F5 BIG-IP Diameter Traffic Management can help network administrators to best meet the demands of their customers both now and in the future. Today, with the advancement of technology, everything from phones to cars, refrigerators, home appliances and even more are connected. This wide range of network equipment has also increased the expectations of customers regarding the performance and reliability of the devices. Traffic management with F5 BIG-IP DTM can distribute the load and signal in several different servers.
BIG-IP DTM key features
By using BIG-IP DTM and its licenses, we get unique features that we will introduce below.
Scalable
BIG-IP DTM enables end-to-end L4-L7 load balancing solutions, including Smart Diameter session stickiness.
Bidirectional Transformation
Implements complex business logic to connect multiple protocols and providers.
Flexibility
Provides full support for multiple Diameter use cases and is easily customizable using a sophisticated programming layer.
Secure
BIG-IP DTM license, standardizes functionality and validates token messaging to protect against roaming attacks.
Available
Advanced Diameter Load Balancing distributes signaling traffic across multiple servers.
Visibility
The licensed BIG-IP DTM Shows your network’s performance in real-time for troubleshooting, analysis and network usage statistics.
Load Balancing
Balances traffic using round robin, weighted round robin, contextual, response time, least loaded, and external policies.
Context Awareness
The licensed BIG-IP DTM Identifies multiple Diameter nodes for more sophisticated routing policies.
Interoperability
Building a new system from scratch is expensive and unnecessary. F5 provides services to help organizations adapt BIG-IP diameter traffic management to their existing system, whether built with F5 technology. organizations get a customized system that works well on multiple platforms and meets the unique needs of their network.
Diameter Load Balancer
Intelligent load balancing means a smoother ride for everyone. BIG-IP Diameter Traffic Management identifies incoming traffic and routes it to optimized parts of your network, improving the customer experience. It also protects your network from surges by routing and rerouting signals to available RAN towers, so you don’t have to invest in new infrastructure to handle occasional traffic spikes.
Controlling Congestion
BIG-IP Diameter Traffic Management manages traffic congestion within the signaling network and protects the signaling core by:
- Monitoring and protect network elements with intelligent throttling that considers the priority of traffic between groups of servers
- Identifying and treating the specific cause of congestion on a per-customer basis
- Prioritizing traffic by type, device, or subscriber
- Ensuring performance Specifications
Traffic management
F5 solutions help you manage your network in multiple ways, consolidated on a unified platform. A single system streamlines your administrative processes and helps your network run more efficiently.
BIG-IP Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT)
Stay ahead of the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 without compromising the end-user experience.
BIG-IP Policy Enforcement Manager
Manage your policies with a comprehensive policy enforcement capability.
Diameter Traffic Management
This F5 Implementation Guide provides instructions for configuring version 11.4 and later of the BIG-IP system for load balancing and intelligent traffic management for the Diameter protocol. Diameter’s base protocol is intended to provide an authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) framework for applications such as network access or IP mobility. Diameter is also designed to work in local authentication, authorization and billing as well as roaming situations. The BIG-IP system’s ability to help manage Diameter traffic is extremely valuable.
In a typical load balancing situation, there are X number of clients and Y number of servers. If all clients generate a connection, there are a total of X connections. BIG-IP LTM can balance X/Y connections to each server (which can be referred to as connection-based load balancing). However, in a Diameter environment, the number of clients is likely to be small (X may even be less than Y), implying a small number of (X) connections. In addition, each link is long-lived and offers little opportunity to balance Diameter traffic per link. Several sessions can be set up within a transport connection.
Diameter keeps transport connections (TCP/SCTP) alive and reuses them for many Diameter sessions. Each Diameter session can contain multiple messages. The Diameter protocol is asynchronous; so a client can send a new request without waiting for a response from the previous request. The server can send a response in any order and also send a request. In a high-load environment, per-message load balancing or message-based load balancing is required instead of connection-based load balancing. Imagine that there is a transport connection between each client (NAS) and server (diameter host server).
The work required for a Diameter server to generate a response is significantly greater than the work required for a client to generate a request. Because of this, the Diameter server presents a performance bottleneck for AAA requests from a single client out of all requests from a given client using the same transport connection are served by a single server. By supporting message-based load balancing, BIG-IP LTM can act as a proxy, demultiplexing each client request to multiple servers, improving overall performance and scalability.
