Nokia today launched its Dynamic Diameter Engine, a virtualized system that scales control-plane traffic in mobile and fixed networks.

Nokia says the engine has been tested by an un-named North American Tier 1 operator in its private telco cloud to handle 500,000 transactions per second.

“Diameter” is the name of a protocol used for communication between different systems in a service provider’s environment. The control plane of the network carries the signaling traffic.

Steffen Paulus, head of marketing for policy and charging at Nokia, says new use cases such as the Internet of Things (IoT) are signaling-intensive and are requiring more exchanges between applications and servers. Nokia designed its Dynamic Diameter Engine to help service providers deal with the complexity.

The engine includes Nokia's Agile Rules Technology, which helps operators apply rules in complex signaling control scenarios. The engine effectively serves as a control-plane traffic cop. And it prepares the network for the increase in connected things and complex new applications.

“If you look at the current products in diameter signaling today, the majority are relying on custom hardware,” says Paulus. “There are some vendors that are virtualizing the capabilities of their product. In our case, we developed this product with virtualization as a key priority.”

Nokia’s Tier 1 telco partner is using its own hardware with the Dynamic Diameter Engine.

“As service providers start to virtualize that function, they want to run in their telco cloud using the server platform they want, rather than having a vendor tell them which servers to install,” says Paulus.

Traffic-signaling is a basic function for the Dynamic Diameter Engine. But Nokia says with its Agile Rules Technology, the engine can handle complex use cases such as enhanced security and LTE roaming. And it’s ready to support emerging signaling use cases, as well.