Stateful management of tens of thousands of secure, reliable, high-quality subscriber sessions over multiple access types requires modern product design. New challenges - such as cost-effective scaling of multi-access subscriber connections, granular session management, and improved service creation and control - must be addressed at the system level.
With this perspective, and in compliance with leading standards including 3GPP/2, ITU and PCMM, the Stoke Session Exchange (SSX) was designed and developed. This approach offers fundamental feature, price and performance advantages over re-purposed routers or legacy session-oriented platforms. Highlights of the SSX include:
Multi-Access Intelligent Session Management
The SSX provides comprehensive management of diverse session and tunnel types to unify different kinds of access networks, ensuring services can be deployed consistently to subscribers regardless of location or device. Operators can deploy the SSX for a range of initial convergence initiatives with the assurance that the platform can evolve to provide the multi-access foundation required in the future.
Contemporary System Architecture
Stoke's unique architecture distributes control, packet forwarding, encryption and switching functions to every line card. This yields linear scaling of subscribers and high performance services as well as a low entry cost with "pay as you grow" economics. Programmability in the control and data paths ensures rapid feature development and application versatility. By harnessing merchant silicon, the SSX leverages processing price/performance curves and ensures system longevity through future technology lifecycles.
Enhanced Service Creation and Billing
The SSX has the processing power to unlock the value of multimedia services in a scalable manner. Content awareness, session and flow-based QoS and service control, and highly dynamic policy management enable operators to offer a wide range of innovative new services and generate highly granular accounting records. Providers can now create, track and charge for services based on any combination of bandwidth usage, time, events, or content.
Carrier-Class Foundation
SSX hardware is highly reliable with no single point of failure, and critical components are redundant and hot swappable. Additionally, SSX software employs the latest high availability design principles, making it highly resilient with a modular architecture and feature set. Stoke developed middleware that implements self-monitoring and self-correcting capabilities to provide proactive fault recovery.