Viewpoint
The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a major opportunity for carriers. Industry analyst firms have predicted the market will likely be 20-30 billion connected units by 2020, with a market opportunity of more than $300 billion in incremental revenue for vendors of products and services. For carriers, this can translate into opportunities for new services, up-selling and cross-selling with new partners, and new levels of customer experience and service through leveraging big data.
However, IoT also represents a major burden for carriers in terms of signaling and security as this involves continuous authentication and registration actions, bursts of data traffic, unpredictable effects of unmanaged and non-flawless products, and hostile hacker intrusions.
Clearly, IoT will result in an explosion of signaling sources like devices, apps and sensors that in turn will place unprecedented demands on the carrier network. Signaling is at the heart of mobile connectivity. Carrier networks today are not architected to handle efficiently the additional signaling load and security issues expected from these billions of devices.
Carriers will need a new signaling architecture that can address the impact of introducing billions of roaming and static devices, the subscriber behavior and bandwidth requirements, and new applications. Additionally, there will be signaling messages around policy controls, charging and the like associated with devices and subscribers that will add to the signaling burden.
Speaking of charging, the majority of these devices will have much lower average revenue per user (ARPU) than traditional data, voice and video services, say pennies versus dollars for example. Carriers will need proficient data management and analytics platforms to collect, host, analyze and report all the machine-generated data to develop and offer new customer experiences and services. IoT adds to the current Opex and Capex pressures facing carriers today.
IoT security has been called the “elephant in the room.” Security and data privacy requirements must be addressed at multiple levels – the network, the operating systems, the devices and applications, the middleware and firmware, and the cloud. No wonder current IoT security approaches are fragmented. Unlike with mobile phones, the majority of devices connecting to a carrier’s network are not going to be tested. But carriers will need to ensure their networks processing IoT traffic are secure, especially when handing off traffic to other carriers.
What carriers may not understand is how the signaling burden and security are related, and can be addressed with a new signaling architecture.
We believe a new signaling architecture will address the signaling burden associated with IoT. Such a signaling architecture relies on a software-based Centralized Signaling and Routing Control (CRSC) platform that virtualizes all signaling functions, dramatically simplifying the core network. By reducing signaling complexity, carriers can offload less financially valued IoT traffic to where it can be handled most efficiently and not put higher revenue producing traffic at risk. This also protects quality of service agreements with customers.
If signaling is the heart of mobile connectivity, hackers are targeting that heart with spam, unauthorized real-time location tracking, phone call interception, and fraudulent calls. The majority of existing firewall solutions are not designed to address the new IoT related threats to the signaling network in an effective and cost-efficient manner. Neither are existing firewall solutions designed for the distributed firewall architecture that is needed for geographic dispersed networks and distributed service execution with SDN and NFV.
The firewall solution as part of a CSRC platform offers such protection. It offers carriers a network-wide ability to automatically remove unwanted traffic as messages can rapidly accumulate and impact network availability. Similarly network traffic can be shaped automatically to preserve quality of service for paying customers, to manage roaming devices or non-subscribers and to mitigate security threats at the signaling layer. And the CSRC model provides defense and operational consistency across the different signaling firewalls for the individual protocols like SS7, Diameter, SIP, DNS and HTTP.
In addition, as carriers transition to next-generation networks using Diameter- or SIP-based communications, interworking of signaling control protocols complicates security and exposes further threats. A signaling firewall solution as part of a CSRC platform provides a multi-layer protocol stack threat evaluation and protection of all network traffic including from IoT devices not available in existing firewall solutions.
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