Veraz Networks, Inc., headquartered in San Jose, California, was formed in 2002 as a merger of ECI Telecom’s Next Generation Telephony business unit and NexVerse Networks, and has now grown into a firm with a worldwide presence and 350 employees around the globe. Veraz also raised $30 Million in venture capital in 2003, and has been cash flow positive ever since—both notable exceptions to the difficulties that many communications companies have experienced in the last few years. With R&D offices in both India and Israel, Veraz Networks is a provider of softswitch-based, toll-quality packet telephony solutions, serving both existing and next generation networks. Veraz claims over 700 carrier customers in 140 countries, carrying over 21 billion minutes per month of voice, fax, and modem traffic.
The Veraz Networks mission is to seamlessly interconnect diverse networks—including the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), Internet Protocol (IP)-based networks, and fixed and mobile wireless networks—into an evolving network based solely upon IP. The Veraz architecture is based upon what they call the Any Network Solution, and focuses on three distinct technologies: data compression, network switching, and enhanced applications.
The Veraz data compression solutions are called Digital Circuit Multiplication Equipment (DCME), and are designed to reduce costs by maximizing bandwidth utilization, thereby increasing network capacity for voice, fax, and voice-band data (VBD) traffic. This equipment is compliant with compression standards, which allows toll quality transmission and interoperability between various networks. The DTX-600 product is a high-capacity, multi-rate voice and data compression system that can simultaneously compress toll quality voice, fax, voice-band data, and signaling. For point-to-point applications, two DTX-600 terminals are interconnected with a backbone circuit such as a T-1 line operating at 1.544 Mbps. The inputs to the DTX-600 can come from PSTN switches (carrying voice, fax, or voice-band data), or IP traffic from a LAN by means of a router. The DTX-600 adheres to the ITU-T G.729 coding standard, and is capable of a 20:1 compression ratio, thus dramatically increasing the utilization of that backbone circuit.
The Veraz softswitch is called the ControlSwitch, which is a multi-tiered, distributed software system that executes on Sun® servers, and is interconnected over an underlying IP data network. It is designed as a very scalable architecture, allowing service providers to start with a single system and then scale to a larger network, spanning multiple geographic centers and adding components as the traffic and end-user requirements increase.
The ControlSwitch architecture is based upon five modular elements: Service Policies, Service Logic, Control, Signaling, and Management. The Service Policies section consists of a Policy Element, which supports routing, screening, intelligent network service triggers, quality of service (QoS), authentication, and other parameters; and the Subscriber Data Access Point, which processes real-time subscriber data queries. The Service Logic section consists of the Service Execution Element, which creates, deploys, and activates various services. The Control section consists of a Call Control Element, which supports protocol-specific call control, such as Signaling System 7 (SS7), ISDN, and others; and the IP Call Element, which provides Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and H.323 protocol processing. The Signaling section includes a Signaling Gateway, which allows the ControlSwitch to access and utilize resources on the SS7 networks; the Access Signaling Element, which represent signaling proxies; and the Border Control Element, which enables Network Access Translation (NAT) transversal, topology hiding, and VoIP Firewalls. The Management section collects and stores call detail, billing, element, and subscriber information.
The ControlSwitch supports a wide array of industry-standard protocols, including SIP, H.323, MGCP, H.248, ISDN and Q.931, and can scale from 2,000 to over 1,000,000 ports per switch. Further details on the Veraz Networks architecture and products can be found at www.veraznetworks.com. Our next tutorial will continue our examination of vendors’ architectures.
Copyright Acknowledgement: © 2006 DigiNet ® Corporation, All Rights Reserved
Author’s Biography
Mark A. Miller, P.E. is President of DigiNet ® Corporation, a Denver-based consulting engineering firm. He is the author of many books on networking technologies, including Voice over IP Technologies, and Internet Technologies Handbook, both published by John Wiley & Sons.
