About Session Agents

This section describes session agents. A session agent defines a signaling endpoint. It is a next hop signaling entity that can be configured to apply traffic shaping attributes. Service elements such as gateways, softswitches, and gatekeepers are defined automatically within the Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller as session agents. For each session agent, concurrent session capacity and rate attributes can be defined. You can group session agents together into session agent groups and apply allocation strategies to achieve traffic load balancing.

You can assign a media profile to a session agent and indicate whether the transport protocol is SIP or H.323. If the protocol is H.323, you need to indicate whether the session agent is a gateway or a gatekeeper.

You can configure a set of attributes and constraints for each session agent to support the following:

• session access control: Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller only accepts requests from configured session agents
• session admission control (concurrent sessions): Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller limits the number of concurrent inbound and outbound sessions for any known service element.
• session agent load balancing: session agents are loaded based on their capacity and the allocation strategy specified in the session agent group.
• session (call) gapping: Oracle® Enterprise Session Border Controller polices the rate of session attempts to send to and receive from a specific session agent.