“Are you kidding me, you most definitely need it!” This is how your computer salesman will react if you’re naïve enough to question the role of a fast microprocessor in your brand new laptop. Imagine playing High-definition 3D games on your laptop powered by x86 processor, that too with several windows open!

Transferring this analogy to the LTE scenario, operators are clueless about why they are experiencing recurring incidents of heavy load on their network topology. For example, during the recent London Olympics, we saw a sudden service disruption across Twitter as operators struggled to handle the ever-rising volume of tweets generated by users worldwide.

If simple tweets can lead to Network disruption, one can imagine the traffic that can be expected with Videos and Photos becoming more and more popular on the 4G network. While operators have changed to data caps, tiered plans, and a variety of complex services, this has however, resulted in increased signaling traffic. Operators need to monitor Diameter signaling traffic and analyze how their 4G networks will perform during actual data surge scenarios.

Basically, whenever operators introduce new services like tiered services, fair access policy, shared wallet etc., it means adding new diameter elements like PCRF, HSS, OCS, AAA, MME to scale with ever growing traffic. The number of diameter elements and signaling traffic will correspondingly increase leading to a signaling mesh in the network.

If you don’t want your 4G network to be burdened with this signaling mess, you must introduce the missing component we’re talking of – it’s called Diameter signaling Controllers (DSC).

What is Diameter Signaling Controller?

Put it simply, the DSC is like a new age processor for the 4G LTE network to ensure that all the signals in the network are routed properly and do not cause network congestion by concentrating around single network element.

Diameter has been proposed by industry standard bodies like 3GPP and GSMA because it’s the only protocol that can handle that degree of complexity, and scale up to fulfill the promise of LTE mobile technology, helping operators balance the huge number of connections that are going to be active in the future.

Diameter also improves the security capabilities of the 4G platform while dealing with additional scenarios such as network roaming, providing proxy, relay and redirect functions, third party content delivery, translation, interoperability between various Diameter control elements and more.