The Sandvine Platform

Unified Network Policy Control for Any Network

Sandvine provides a single platform to introduce unified network policy control into any fixed, mobile or converged access network, enabling valuable business intelligence, revenue generation and cost reduction solutions.

In Sandvine’s architecture, the powerful Sandvine Policy Engine provides the network policy control foundation upon which network and service management use cases are deployed.

Sandvine’s Policy Engine is the brain behind the world’s most versatile and powerful network policy control technology, and is the foundation of all Sandvine solutions. The Policy Engine can be thought of as a “green box” into which conditions and subscriber entitlements flow, and out of which charging updates, and management actions and signals emerge. Unified across the control and data planes, and interacting via standard interfaces with the B/OSS plane and remote enforcement points, the Sandvine Policy Engine evaluates policy logic on the lowest element in the network that has access to all of the required information. This approach maximizes scalability by reducing centralization and maximizes performance by removing unnecessary communication between elements (avoiding conditions of signaling overload).

As shown in the diagram below, the platform supports a range of network and communications interfaces, making it deployable in any IP environment - from legacy networks to those implementing the latest IPv6 and LTE standards.

Implementation

Three components work in concert and leverage the Policy Engine to implement network policy control:

• The Policy Traffic Switch (PTS) identifies and measures traffic, makes local policy decisions and implements enforcement actions (fulfilling the functions of a PCEF)
• The Service Delivery Engine (SDE) is a policy decision and enforcement element that, like a PCRF, works together with the PTS to provide unified network policy control within multi-vendor and multi-access networks
• The Subscriber Policy Broker (SPB) acts as a subscriber profile repository (SPR) for the Sandvine deployment and provides long-term storage for comprehensive business intelligence insight

Implementing and managing these components is simple thanks to Control Center, Sandvine’s unified policy and operations management graphical user interface. Control Center is included at no extra cost with all Sandvine deployments and provides a single mechanism for monitoring operational information, editing network policies and configuring elements.