Cloud signaling director

Simplify, scale and secure your core signaling

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Nokia Cloud Signaling Director (CSD) simplifies interoperability, enables massive scalability, and secures signaling in 5G networks, and addresses the challenges of 4G traffic growth.

What is Cloud Signaling Director?

The CSD is Nokia’s cloud-native software that provides control for the 5G’s HTTP/2 signaling, both within the 5G core and between the 5G core and untrusted peer networks & untrusted slices (e.g., enterprise, IoT).

It provides three important 5G core network functions:

5G Service Communication Proxy (5G SCP)
5G Security Edge Protection Proxy (5G SEPP)
5G Binding Support Function (5G BSF)

In 4G networks, CSD implements 4G’s Diameter Signaling Controller (DSC).

Nokia CSD can be deployed in any environment, as a CNF, VNF, or PNF. It is designed for extremely high performance, using the Agile Rules Processing (A.R.T.) engine. CSD supports every standard signaling model, as well as non-standard models.

On this page

What is Cloud Signaling Director?
Benefits and features
The challenges facing service providers
Why choose Nokia for your cloud signaling needs?
Resources
Related solutions and products
Learn more

Video

SCP for mirroring and control plane traffic monitoring (demo)

Benefits and features of Cloud Signaling Director

Get smart about signaling

Our CSD product helps you address the challenges of signaling plane traffic growth

Simplify your control topology

Reduce the 4G or 5G core’s complexity by deploying signaling control. You get more flexibility to define control plane behavior and support advanced mediation capabilities.

Manage control plane behavior

Boost operations efficiency, scalability, and performance by defining behavior in the control plane. CSD lets you create routing policies that enable and simplify server selection, load balancing, and session management.

Ensure interoperability in the control plane

Add 4G LTE network elements and 5G network functions without worrying about compatibility issues. With our CSD you can leverage mediation and data manipulation capabilities to ensure interoperability across different element versions and vendor implementations.

Secure the roaming infrastructure

Control and protect the exchange of signaling information across the roaming infrastructure with our 4G LTE Diameter edge agent (DEA) and our 5G Security Edge Protection Proxy (SEPP), which lets you:

Control complex roaming agreements
Hide the network topology
Fix key message content and filter out unwanted data

The challenges facing service providers

Performance, automation and new business drive 5G signaling

In 5G networks, signaling changes from Diameter to 5G’s HTTP/2 and JSON. The challenges in deploying your 5G core include:

Fully utilizing the 5G core’s Service Based Architecture (SBA), including dynamic configurations, massive scaling, and resilience.
Ensuring interoperability across the 5G core, both within and between networks.
Building in security from the start for internal and external threats.

Popular LTE services are driving rapid growth of Diameter traffic

In 4G networks, Diameter-based control plane traffic is escalating as consumers embrace advanced mobile broadband services. This growth results in an increasingly complex control topology and creates inefficiency and unpredictability.

To deliver the rich, secure experiences your customers want, you need an intelligent product that brings greater flexibility to the signaling control plane.

5G Signaling

Having the right 5G signaling architecture from start is essential for business success.

Reduce deployment costs with advanced 5G signaling

Why choose Nokia for your cloud signaling needs?

Cloud-native design

CSD is designed from the start for cloud-native requirements, which avoids legacy software’s challenges when moving to cloud. The CSD is stateless, implements VNF life cycle management operations (installing, healing, scale-in, scale-out, etc.) with relative ease, and uses central DevOps aspects for integration, delivery and image storage. The CSD software integrates several open source services and is decomposed into several modules, providing flexible deployment options.

Agile Rules Technology

CSD is based on our Agile Rules Technology (ART). Backed by more than 150 patents, ART provides ease of use, flexibility, high performance, scalability, and maintainability. With ART you can:

Simplify the creation, testing, and deployment of routing policies with an easy-to-use visualization interface
Address your exact needs with a flexible, wide-ranging collection of routing use cases
Deliver high performance on any scale with policies to control complex routing scenarios
Streamline installation, upgrade, operations, and troubleshooting processes with service provider-centric technology

Extensive signaling experience

CSD draws on our deep knowledge of signaling. We develop the signaling capabilities of our packet core, IMS, and policy and charging control solutions in house. Our products are designed to work successfully in any multivendor environment. We have used our experience to help dozens of service providers around the world with their specific signaling needs.

For more details on how the CSD provides signaling in a 5G Core, visit our 5G Signaling page.