PCA Scalability

The PCA application is highly scalable. In addition to scaling up to support large customer networks, PCA can scale down to support small customers, lab trials, and demos. This section describes supported configurations that illustrate how the PCA feature scales.

For large systems, PCA can scale up as follows:

Eight mated pairs of PCA DSRs (16 sites) or up to 5 mated triplets (15 sites) per network
Three enclosures per PCA DSR site using half-height blades
Each enclosure has 16 half-height slots.
Two pairs of IPFE blades per PCA DSR
Sixteen DA-MP blades per PCA DSR

Figure 1 illustrates a sample PCA network consisting of 6 mated pairs, or 12 sites with components that must be configured as follows:

An instance of a Site (Place with type Site) is created for each physical location of a PCA DSR.
All MP servers (both SBRs and DA-MPs) are assigned to the Site where they are physically located.
An instance of a PCA Mated Pair (Place Association with type PCA Mated Pair) is created for each pair of sites that are mates.
A pre-determined number of Policy Binding Server Groups are created on the PCA DSR nodes that are initially deployed.
- Each Policy Binding Server Group, if configured for site redundancy, must have at least one Server at the home site and one Server at the mate site.
- Policy Binding Server Groups can exist on more than 2 sites, but the PCA network is not operational until all sites hosting Policy Binding Server Groups are operational.
A Policy Binding Resource Domain is created including all Policy Binding Server Groups.
A pre-determined number of Session Server Groups are created at each mated pair.
Each Session Server Group, if configured for site redundancy, must have at least one server at the home site and one server at the mate site.
A Policy and Charging Session Resource Domain is created for each mated pair including the Session Server Groups at the two mated sites.
A DSR (multi-active cluster) Server Group is created for each Site, containing all of the DA-MP servers at the Site.
A Policy and Charging DRA Resource Domain is created including the Diameter Signaling Router Server Group at each of the mated Sites.
A PCA Binding Region (Place Association with type PCA Binding Region) is created containing all Sites.

The Mated Pair of PCA DSR sites illustrated in Figure 1 could support approximately 336,000 Diameter MPS with site redundancy (with DA-MPs engineered at 40%).

The single site PCA DSR illustrated in Figure 1 could support approximately 384,000 Diameter MPS (with DA-MPs engineered at 80%).