Sentinel is a collection of JAIN SLEE services

Sentinel is a services platform for real-time session control of TDM, IMS, and Diameter sessions. It’s built on the Rhino TAS platform.

Sentinel consists of:

  • a set of JAIN SLEE services and Service Building Blocks (SBBs)

  • JAIN SLEE profiles

  • Standard OpenCloud resource adaptors for SS7, SIP, Diameter, HTTP, and CDRs

  • Sentinel-specific resource adaptors for generating unique IDs and correlation IDs.

The following sections present a SLEE-centric architectural overview of Sentinel, and introduce each of the SLEE services that are part of the Sentinel package (for SS7, SIP, and Diameter).

Architecture of a Sentinel service

Each Sentinel service has the same SLEE-based architecture (see the diagram below).

sentinel service arch

SBBs

A Sentinel service consists of:

  • A front-end SBB, which:

    • receives events from the front-end network element (For example, the SS7 front-end service receives SS7 events from an MSC.)

    • controls the session with the front-end network element (For example, the SS7 front-end may arm events in the switch or release the call.)

    • applies an appropriate session plan (For example, the SS7 supports three session plans: one for voice triggers, one for SMS triggers, one for third-party voice triggers.)

    • hosts POJO features and mappers, and has SLEE child relations to SBB features

    • hosts the Sentinel mediation layer, which:

      • presents a Diameter Ro interface to the front-end

      • provides charging methods such as SCUR and IEC

      • provides promotions

    • runs features execution scripts, features and mappers.

  • One or more OCS Driver SBBs, which:

    • integrate Sentinel core (the front-end) with a particular type of OCS

    • have a Diameter Ro interface to the mediation layer, and map Diameter Ro to and from the charging protocol used by the OCS

    • are shared by all services.

Resource adaptors

Each service has resource adaptor bindings for:

  • a resource adaptor for the front-end protocol (For example the SS7 service uses the CGIN resource adaptor to connect to an MSC, and the HTTP resource adaptor for accepting third-party call setup requests.)

  • any protocol used by features (For example, the subscriber data feature uses the OpenCloud DB-Query RA to talk to a relational database. The USSDNotification feature uses the CGIN resource adaptor to send USSD notifications with GSM MAP.)

Profiles

A Sentinel service accesses configuration data stored in these SLEE profiles:

  • platform configuration — configuration data of a Sentinel production install

  • feature configuration — configuration data for each feature

  • feature execution scripts — lookup tables for selecting features execution scripts

  • mapper configuration — lookup tables for selecting mappers

  • promotions scripts — lookup table of scriptable promotions.

Note The profiles are managed using the Sentinel element manager.

Sentinel Services

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