Installation guide

Acme Packet 6100 Hardware Installation and Maintenance Guide 21
Acme Packet 6100 Series Hardware Architecture
The Acme Packet 6100 series hardware is purpose-built for SBC applications
and relies on state-of-the-art network processing and traffic management
components to deliver security and scalable media processing.
The network processing subsystem is comprised of the network processors,
traffic management. This subsystem hosts the media control module and is
completely hardware-based. Adjacent to the network processing components
are the QoS engine for monitoring bearer QoS metrics.
The signaling processor subsystem is comprised of the host processor
subsystem and associated memory. The session control functions - including
the session signaling layer, call routing and management elements - are hosted
on the signaling processor subsystem.
The separation of signaling and media processing is necessary for the
following reasons:
• To guarantee that media processing will never overwhelm signaling
processing. Signaling processing performance is not impacted by media
processing load as it is with single more monolithic solutions based on
general purpose computing platforms.
• To protect the signaling processing subsystem from overload and DoS
attacks. When DoS attacks are detected, these attacks are policed and
isolated in the hardware.