. The new architecture has been purpose-built for telcos, national and international carriers. MERA provides a session controller solution that consists of several interconnected signaling and media servers. The signaling servers share a single routing table and can therefore manage VoIP traffic throughout the entire network, irrespective of their physical location.
MERA's distributed architecture includes:
- Capacity and CAPEX: the clustered architecture of MERA's session controller allows a capacity increase up to 40, 000 concurrent calls. The solution scales by adding extra servers.
- Traffic routing and QoS enforcement: as all signaling servers in a MERA cluster share a common database on routes and policies, they distribute calls throughout the entire network irrespective of the geographical location of each server. Furthermore, MERA's session controller delivers end-to-end signaling capabilities. MERA's signaling servers perform bandwidth mapping and allocation, and send media flows across channels.
- Configuration and management: The MERA Session Controller makes Tier 1 networks easily manageable despite their size and complexity. All components in a MERA cluster share a single set of configuration files, with all updates automatically synchronized between the servers. It means carriers need to configure the system once.
Infotel Communication S.p.A. has deployed the MERA MVTS session controller with distributed architecture in its nationwide VoIP network for delivery of real-time voice services in Italy and abroad. MERA's cluster at Infotel Communication is composed of the MVTS signaling server and two media servers deployed in Milan, and handles VoIP traffic from 12 POPs in Italy and Europe, over 20 Tier 1 and Tier 2 international carriers, and a network of resellers and phone shops. All signaling flows are concentrated by the MVTS signaling server, which distributes calls between the media servers. With this architecture, media information does not have to follow the signaling flows, thus offloading the signaling server for higher traffic throughput.
"MERA's distributed session controller is a highly efficient tool for providing high-quality termination, origination and wholesale services to our customers throughout the country", says Luigi Ghirardi, Technical Director at Infotel Communication. "The convenient architecture of MERA enables us to keep our network simple and easily manageable, ensuring fast and easy rollout of new services. With MERA's solution we can grow our network in no time: adding an extra server to the current configuration will take less than five minutes, increasing capacity by 1,500 concurrent calls. Along with its feature-rich functionality and ready scalability, MERA's MVTS has saved us a lot of money: for instance, deployment of back-to-back gateways would have cost us from 100 percent to 200 percent depending on the functionalities needed, and the management overhead would mean a further increase of approximately 30 percent per year. Furthermore, a distributed and "clustered" solution is even more cost-effective - it's the economy of scale that is at work here. The bigger your capacity, the more you gain, which is not always the case with multiple single-box units."