Functional and Performance validation and testing is essential for Session Border Controllers to ensure security, performance, and compliance in SIP-based networks.

Session Border Controllers are essential for security, network performance, and compliance in SIP-based networks. They must undergo regular functional and performance testing. Find out how Emblasoft Evolver can help.

The Session Border Controller (SBC) is essential in today’s SIP-based networks, optimising and securing the seamless delivery of traffic between different networks, including enterprise, and particularly between international networks.

An SBC sits at the perimeter (or border) of the network and manages real-time IP communications securely between different devices and networks, admitting or denying access to traffic, based on rules and security procedures.

Session Border Controller  - essential infrastructure for today’s networks

In operator networks, the SBC plays a crucial role in admitting traffic (it’s the heart of the IMS core, for example) from users and devices in the network, while performing a similar role between networks.

Now well-established, the first SBCs emerged back in the early days of VoIP, as operators (and enterprises) sought to build defences into IP communication networks.

Despite their maturity, the SBC market is seeing strong growth. That’s why the global market for SBCs is forecast to grow at a strong CAGR of 8.2% from $838 million in 2025 to 1,886.0 million by 2035^[1]. SBCs handle security features, interoperability, and policy enforcement across VoIP networks, including features such as encryption, call routing, and denial-of-service (DoS) protection, as well as providing compliance capabilities, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Gateway and gatekeeper

This key gateway functionality also means they are subject to national regulations, covering security as well as signalling / authentication procedures to protect the public from spoof calls and other threats – which means they must evolve over time to meet new threats.

Here are just some of the key functions that SBCs perform:

1. Ensuring the correct routing of IP traffic between networks and devices.
2. Enabling multi-vendor interoperability.
3. Support for SIP trunking.
4. Security and protection against multiple threats, including DoS, DDoS, spoof calls, and much more, as well signalling encryption.
5. Assuring network performance by applying policies to meet SLAs.
6. Resilience by assuring performance.

All this means that SBCs are part of critical infrastructure for national networks and international IP-based roaming and interconnection. It all means that validating and testing SBCs is essential. As legislation and compliance requirements shift, it’s mandatory to ensure that SBCs adhere to all relevant regulations, as well as provide adequate security and network performance.

Comprehensive functional and performance testing of SBCs

In essence, there are two types of testing that must be performed:

• Functional testing (UE to UE), which ensures that SBC core functionality is delivered, according to the specified goals and parameters.
• Performance testing. Because SBCs carry heavy traffic loads, their performance also needs to be tested to ensure that they can cope with large traffic volumes and surges, in real-time and without any drop in the expected QoS.

Emblasoft Evolver and its new high-throughput module can perform comprehensive validation, testing, and active monitoring for both functional and performance testing under heavy load conditions across multiple protocols.

It’s available as a high-performance, pre-packaged and pre-configured server ready for high performance testing.

To find out more, download our recent white paper here.

^[1] https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/session-border-controller-market