Introduction

 

The release notes are a guide to help existing and prospective customers understand what is new in the Cloud Softswitch product.

 


 

Features & Improvements

 

Local Number Routing


LRN and CDRs

LRN & Local Callings details are now recorded with the generated CDRs, making LRN routing comprehension easier.


LRN and the Test Dial Plan tool

The Test Dial plan tool can now also be used for LRN routes


Monitoring

LRN response times are now monitored, and viewable as a time series graph.


Billing


Conditional logic in Invoice Templates

It’s now possible to put conditional logic in your invoice templates, allowing you to have more control of the invoices you send to your clients.


Invoice viewer in web

Auto generated invoices are now browsable via the web interface. Users can see the account, date, and view the generated invoice.


Ability to restart billing upon account payment event.

Example:

A user tops up his/her account balance to five dollars. Based on the service plan assigned to the account, the system will charge the account for five dollars and allow the use of free minutes included in the service plan. When free minutes are depleted, the accounts top-up balance and next_billing_time will be reset which allows the use of free minutes once again.


Ability to make a service plan not charge service fees until 1st use of account

Useful for scenarios where you pre-provision & activate an inventory of calling cards in advance. If you charge weekly service fees, this feature will allow you to start deducting service fees only after the calling card has been activated based on first use.


Conferencing

Conferencing module moved to userland

The conferencing module has been updated to run in user land. This eliminates the need for a kernel module that in rare conditions caused a system crash.


Routing

Outbound proxy for vendor connections

It is now possible to specify an outbound SIP proxy for specific vendor connections.

Weighted distribution policy

Weighted distribution policy has been added into routing groups

 

Payment Processors

DenziBank now supported

Support for the Turkish bank DeniziBank 3DFULL POS payment gateway is now generally available.


Performance

Session tracker clustering

The switch now uses a cluster of session trackers per server environment. This removes environment-wide CPS and concurrent calls bottleneck by allowing calls from separate accounts to be processed in parallel. Large installations on multi-core machines will see performance improvements.

Call Processing Time

Several optimizations and improvements have been made to reduce Call Processing Time (CPT) from approximately ~175 ms to ~80 ms. Call Processing Time varies based on a customer's configuration and use of the switch.

Operating System

The switch base operating system now runs on the 9.X FreeBSD release, which brings improvements in system concurrency and network performance. This change also reduces customers CPT.

Database Server

The DB server (PostgreSQL) has been updated to the latest version 9.2, which brings numerous improvements and bug fixes as compared to the previous version 9.1.

Improved system restart times

Restart times for systems with large routing tables has been greatly improved.

XML-RPC performance improvements

The XML-API database access has been optimized, allowing for faster response times.

CDRs performance and durability improvements.

CDRs are spooled to a temporary disk cache, which improves CDR durability in the event of a system crash, and CDR write performance is significantly improved.

Media Relay performance

The performance of media relaying has been significantly improved to reduce the system load, increase maximum total capacity of the system and reduce extra jitter. The measured reduction of the CPU usage reaches up to 15% per server.


Protocol

P-Asserted-Identity conformance with RFC-3255

RFC-3255 conformance has been improved.

 

Security

Improved segregation for multi-tenancy systems

Following the defence-in-depth philosophy, multi-tenancy environments are logically separated, which significantly reduces the risk of privilege escalation to other tenants on a system.

IP Firewall

IP Firewall rules can now be configured via the web interface, allowing for easier management of IP based security. Restrict access to the web interface, xmlrpc api, database and sip using IP Firewall rules is now simple.

 

Least Privilege

Processes now shed any unneeded system privileges after startup, making the system less susceptible to privilege elevation. This limits a systems exposure for any potential attack on those daemons.

 

Storage

Upgraded to Postgresql 8.3

The system now runs Postgresql 9.4 for new installations. We continue to support postgresql versions from 8.3 upward for existing deployments, even after updating to the 4.0 release.

 

DID / Number Managment

DID Vendor coupling

Systems can now associate DIDs with a list of specific originating vendor connections, which enhances the level of security for inbound calls.

 

System Monitoring Improvements

Numerous improvements in capture of statistics:

  • System and call statistics accuracy and reliability has been improved.

  • Packets Per Second graphs have been added, especially useful for environments with high RTP traffic.

  • LRN latency now tracked in a time-series graph.

  • Kernel network buffers activity is now tracked and presented as a new time-series graph.

 

Bug Fixes

 

Fixed an issue where, under certain conditions, a newly added rate would not take effect in call routing for a long time

 

Fixed a synchronization issue that caused incorrect "Connection capacity exceeded" messages

 

Fixed issue where connection priority is not going to its original value after a connections quality monitoring has passed from bad to good.

 

What’s Next

For our next release cycle, we will be making improvements in the following areas:

  • Performance and Capacity improvements in the Authentication and Authorization subsystems

  • Performance and Capacity improvements in the Routing subsystem