Subscriber Management in Service Provider Networks with BIG-IP Devices

Managing Subscribers

Managing subscriber profiles continues to become increasingly challenging for service providers. The fundamental requirement for high availability remains as user directories continue to grow on an unprecedented scale. Many service providers now operate multiple systems for authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), potentially on a distributed basis, further complicating seamless service delivery.

Subscriber management also plays an important role in maximizing average revenue per user (ARPU). Offering users a choice of different services and service levels—potentially on an opt-in/opt-out basis—can help increase ARPU, but managing traffic based on the many permutations and combinations can be a daunting task for subscriber management.

F5 can help service providers scale their subscriber management systems by enforcing traffic management policies based on subscriber profiles—an integral part of F5’s Service Delivery Network (SDN). F5’s SDN is an architecture of products and solutions designed to manage service delivery to users and devices. VIPRION—F5’s service provider-grade chassis-based controller—provides scalability and high-availability for subscriber management and application delivery. BIG-IP devices support Message-Based Load-Balancing (MBLB), purpose-built for messaging protocols used for subscriber management and signaling. A single VIPRION chassis holds up to four hot swappable blades, and is capable of supporting up to 64 million concurrent sessions—and millions more subscribers.

BIG-IP products and solutions are far more than high-availability load balancers. As a proxy for disparate subscriber management systems, BIG-IP devices can provide interoperability for a single protocol, such as Diameter, or between protocols, such as Diameter, RADIUS, LDAP, and Active Directory.

While managing subscriber data, the SDN intercepts, inspects, directs, and transforms traffic. How BIG-IP products and solutions transform session traffic can be customized using F5’s event-driven scripting language, iRules. For example, an iRules script could be written to proxy between an existing RADIUS server and the IP Multimedia Subsystem’s (IMS) home subscriber server or other implementation of the IMS user profile server function.

F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) helps simplify authentication, consolidate infrastructure, and reduce costs by providing dynamic, context-aware access control based on user identity. The BIG-IP APM Visual Policy Editor makes it easy to create access control policies at layer 4 through layer 7 for either individuals or groups. BIG-IP APM also provides a form of single sign-on (SSO) by caching and proxying user credentials during an entire session, giving users access to all authorized services without the need for separate log-ins.

Analytics are also available for subscriber as well as application traffic details. Access to subscriber analytics helps operators implement customer profiling, which can help maximize ARPU by capitalizing on individual user needs and preferences. Service delivery statistics can be used by other devices or applications on the network for everything from geo-based ad insertion to the caching of bandwidth-intensive video traffic or software updates.

F5’s strategic partnerships further enhance subscriber management capabilities. These services leverage dynamic subscriber information, including utilization, location, and context to give service providers more granular, policy-based control over network and application usage. The versatility afforded by iRules and iControl—a Web services-enabled open API—provide sophisticated forms of integration between the network operator’s AAA servers and third-party systems.