The product on which Acme Packet is basing its new Open Session Routing architecture is actually five years old – but that’s the good news, said Seamus Hourihan, the company’s vice president of marketing and product management.

The OSR architecture, and its accompanying ecosystem of partners, is designed to enable SIP-based interactive communications among disparate mobile, wireline and transport networks. By basing this new architecture on its well-established Net-Net Service Router product line, Acme Packet is able to show service providers how to centralize the provisioning of routing information and control among multiple SIP-based elements that populate the borders of wireless, wireline, IMS and peering networks.

And because the individual SIP signaling elements are session-stateful, the Net-Net SR which operates in the core of the network can operate in a stateless or transaction-stateful mode, which maximizes its performance and throughput.

“Service providers are moving to an all-IP core to reduce costs,” Hourihan said. To maintain that efficiency, they also want to eliminate the need for transcoding, or constantly converting traffic from IP to other formats. The OSR architecture is set up to allow multiple networks – 2G/3G wireless, the Internet, 3G/4G wireless nets which are IP-based, the PSTN, IP peering and IP wireline – to communicate among themselves to support a wide variety of converged applications.

Each network is connected into the IP core via its own protocol or interface, whether that’s an IMS interface, a softswitch, a session border controller or another device, and each network needs access to the appropriate network databases – ENUM, E911, local number portability, DNS, least-cost routing, for instance – to make the appropriate routing decisions, according to Kevin Mitchell, director of solutions marketing for Acme Packet.

Acme Packet also is stressing the open approach it has taken, supporting standards-based interfaces, including ENUM, SIP, DNS and XML.

The fact that tier-one service providers are deploying the system is some validation of Acme Packet’s claims, said Joe McGarvey, an analyst with Current Analysis. Acme Packet has announced one tier one provider, Telus, and says there are others.

“The SR functions as a signaling routing proxy, creating a sort of middleware for signaling routing in a carrier’s network where multiple signaling devices, including mobile switching centers (MSC) and security gateways in mobile domains and softswitches and SBCs in fixed domains, can tap into a single interface to calculate the routing options between two SIP-based devices involved in a communications session,” McGarvey wrote in his assessment. “Acme Packet’s OSR architecture is designed to relieve these devices from the increasingly complex burden of keeping track of routing information and maintaining state on each session running in the network.”

One drawback to Acme Packet’s OSR architecture is that it takes over some functions of softswitches, which could put the company in competition with softswitch makers, who have been some of its prime distributors, McGarvey said.

As part of its announcement, Acme Packet announced an ecosystem of product and service partners for the OSR including:

· NetNumber, which provides addressing and routing solutions for fixed line carriers, mobile operators and cable operators.
· Nominum, a global provider of ENUM translations. Acme Packet is deployed with Nominum in a core wholesale routing solution at TELUS, the second-largest service provider in Canada.
· TransNexus, provider of operations and billing support system software for wholesale VoIP carriers and SIP trunking service providers.
· Vero Systems, provider of real-time traffic management and optimal cost routing.
· NeuStar a central directory services provider offering a suite of neutral application peering capabilities that include policy-enabled, shared routing and addressing directory services, and are based on existing, in-production ENUM solutions.
· Stealth Communications' Voice Peering Fabric (VPF), a private voice Internet which functions as an exchange or meet-point for enterprises, government agencies and carriers to establish peer-to-peer connections in a secure, quality-of-service environment.
· Telcordia Technologies, provider of communications network software and services for IP, wireline, wireless, and cable, including the Telcordia Service Interconnection Registry, a secure, centrally-managed, and carrier-grade registry that enables inter-carrier routing and rating for both TDM- and IP-enabled services.
· XConnect Global Networks, provides trusted NGN peering federation services that enable the deliver of end-to-end multi-media services and reduce operating costs for member companies, including. the settlement-free XConnect Alliance, wholesale cost reducing XConnect DirectRoute, and customized, policy driven XConnect Private Federations.