PRX-PE Traffic Manager for Policy Enforcement

PRX-PE Traffic Manager is a policy enforcement and monitoring system. It is designed for seamless integration with third-party policy control and quota management systems. It supports traffic redirection to IP value-added service (VAS) platforms and provides real-time data to accounting, charging and billing systems. In 3G/4G mobile networks it plays the role of the Policy and Charging Enforcement Function (PCEF), receiving and requesting rules from the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF).

PRX-PE sends statistical data to a policy management system and receives subscriber policy information from it. PRX-PE provides two interfaces: the Policy Interface (PI) and the Messaging Interface (MI). Additionally, PRX-PE provides a Provisioning Interface (PVI) for general system setup and management. PRX-PE only enforces policies. Policy decisions (e.g. quota or service plan decisions) are made by the external policy manager and then sent as real-time rules to PRX-PE.

Application Scenarios

• Subscriber policy enforcement based on policy rules from an external policy manager
• Enforce priorities, bandwidth guarantees and limits
• Traffic redirection of selected IP traffic to a value-added service platform
• Subscriber-aware usage statistics to charging or quota management systems

Deployment

PRX-PE is placed inline between the operator’s network gateway (e.g. GGSN, PDSN or BRAS) and the edge router. As an inline system, PRX-PE sees the entire data traffic and uses its deep packet inspection engine for application-layer quality of service and bandwidth management. It provides all the carrier-grade performance, availability and DPI precision required for such a critical infrastructure element.

Deployment PRX for Policy Enforcement