Testing tool: Building a Diameter Proxy application

Customer profile

The customer is a leading European MVNE providing innovative services to the mobile ecosystem, looking beyond the traditional telecom offering. Parties such as mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and mobile network operators (MNOs) benefit from the MVNE’s fast solutions and tailor made products, being today’s enabler of choice to over 15 successful MVNO customers from countries including the Netherlands, the UK, Poland, Philippines and the USA.

Business challenge

During a complex IN replacement project, the information about data services had to be exchanged between the GGSN and the IN. The greatest challenge came from the fact that the involved network elements had different Diameter implementations that could not exchange any messages with each other. It was a complicated issue, because replacing any of those network elements was not an option. After an initial analysis, our team of engineers discovered that the GGSN was sending messages with AVPs that the IN could not decode, because those were not present in its diameter dictionary.

R Systems contribution and solution

Diameter is an extensible protocol and it is not a rare situation to have dictionary conflicts between Diameter nodes. Based on our 7 years of experience in working with Diameter protocol and supported by our automated testing tool – TOP Testing Suite -, our team has easily configured the necessary dictionary which could be changed to fit our customer’s immediate, as well as long term needs. Using the TOP Testing Suite Diameter client and Diameter server, we have built a simple Diameter Proxy application which gave our client the possibility to alter messages on the fly.

Client benefits

R Systems offered a first solution to the problem in just a few hours after the issue occurred and the final workaround was ready within days. Because the tool is easy to use and can be configured in many ways it is now being used by our customer not only as Diameter Proxy, but was also added to their standard testing procedure of data services using Diameter.

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