NAM Data Sheet

Defend your signaling network against the escalating risks of interconnection.

NAM has been designed from the ground up to address the risks associated with widespread interconnection and network convergence.  It provides advanced signaling security above and beyond the traditional stateless layer three inspection of gateway screening.  Syntax inspection ensures protocol conformance and prevents malformed messages.  Content inspection validates messages, parameters, and parameter values.  Real-time thresholding provides mass call defense and mass message defense to protect against flooding events and allows the signaling network to carry the maximum amount of traffic without degrading its performance.  Using NAM network operators can now provide interconnect partners, MVNOs, and other third parties controlled, secure access to network resources.

Unbillable Phantom Traffic

Unbillable traffic comes in many forms and has many names; phantom traffic, bypass traffic, SIM box traffic, ghost traffic, and misrouted traffic to name a few.  It is one of the most significant and fastest growing problems facing carriers today.  Phantom traffic accounts for as much as 20 percent of many carriers’ terminating traffic and appears to be growing, resulting in billions of dollars in lost revenue.  NAM enables carriers to not only detect phantom traffic but to also prevent it, and in many cases correct it, all in real-time.  Carriers can now ensure their network accepts only valid, revenue-producing calls.

NAM maximizes a carrier’s revenue by eliminating interoperability issues between networks or network nodes.  It detects and corrects call completion problems in real-time.  NAM replaces trouble tickets and unknown problems with billable, revenue-generating call traffic. These types of problems come up all the time in today’s interconnected world of legacy and next-generation equipment.  With the flexibility of NAM’s real-time mediation engine, costly and time-consuming enhancements to network equipment can be avoided.  Fixed, mobile, and VoIP carriers can now solve virtually any signaling problem right out of the box. 

The absence of security has been identified by 3GPP and other industry organizations as a critical weakness of SS7/C7 networks.  In particular, TCAP messages have been singled out recently because SMS spam, fraud, and spoofing have reached epidemic proportions.  SS7 Security Gateways located at network borders can protect TCAP messages using a new security protocol called TCAPsec.  TCAPsec protects all TCAP traffic entering and leaving a network using cryptographic techniques to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and authorization.  NAM’s SS7 Security Gateway feature provides an additional layer of protection on top of Signaling Defense by allowing operators to build trusted domains with one another to prevent fraud, spoofing, and other abuses of their network.    

Signaling ASE® System

NAM is based on Sevis’s Signaling ASE® System, a network transparent application and service engine.  It is a standards-based, carrier-grade, multi-application architecture consisting of a platform, a server, and a client.  At the core of this architecture is the Signaling ASE Platform, a NEBS-certified, highly scalable signaling platform that does not require a point code.  This eliminates network re-engineering and allows for rapid system deployment across 2G or 3G networks and fixed networks.  The platform’s automatic link protection maintains signaling link integrity by allowing messages to flow regardless of platform status.  

The Signaling ASE Server provides a single, centralized interface for provisioning and management of ASE Platforms.  It allows a single Signaling ASE Client, an advanced graphical user interface, to configure and manage the system.  Both the ASE Platform and the ASE Server support an SNMP interface that can be used to forward faults to other management systems.