In Policy Enforcement Manager, you can create a rule within an enforcement policy that tells the system to send aggregated usage data concerning individual subscribers to a Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF). The rule specifies what type of traffic you are interested in, and one of the actions the system can take with the data collected is to send it for processing over a Gx interface to a PCRF.
The system sends the data in the standard Gx format. The report granularity must be set to session for Gx reporting to be available. The PCRF determines the policies for each subscriber, whether or not reporting is enabled, and how often to send the data.
For example, a rule might collect session-based information about all traffic destined to a
particular IP address. The BIG-IP system communicates with the PCRF and
sends information about the subscribers for whom reporting is enabled. You establish the
connection to the PCRF by creating a listener with Gx interface enabled.
Task Summary
Creating a listener for subscriber discovery and policy provisioning
You can create listeners that specify how to handle traffic for policy enforcement.
Creating a listener does preliminary setup tasks on the BIG-IP
system for application visibility, intelligent steering, bandwidth management, and
reporting. You can also connect with a Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) over a
Gx interface.
-
On the Main tab, click .
The Listeners screen opens.
-
Click Create.
The New Listener screen opens.
-
In the Name field, type a unique name for the listener.
-
For the Destination setting, select Host
or Network, and type the IP address or network and netmask to
use.
Tip: You can use a catch-all virtual server
(0.0.0.0) to specify all traffic that is routed to the BIG-IP system.
The system will create a virtual server using the address or network you
specify.
-
For the Service Port setting, type or select the service port
for the virtual server.
-
From the Protocol list, select the protocol of the traffic for
which to deploy enforcement policies (TCP,
UDP, or TCP and UDP).
The system will create a virtual server for each protocol specified.
-
To use network address translation, from the Source Address
Translation list, select Auto Map.
The system treats all of the self IP addresses as translation addresses.
-
For the VLANs and Tunnels setting, move the VLANs and tunnels
that you want to monitor from the Available list to the
Selected list.
-
For subscriber provisioning using RADIUS, ensure that Subscriber Identity
Collection is set to RADIUS.
-
For the VLANs and Tunnels setting, move the VLANs and tunnels
that you want to monitor for RADIUS traffic from the Available list
to the Selected list.
-
In the Policy Provisioning area, select enforcement policies to apply to the
traffic.
-
For Global Policy, move policies to apply to all subscribers
to High Precedence or Low Precedence.
Note: For URL categorization to take effect, you need to associate the
enforcement policy with a classification profile.
-
For Unknown Subscriber Policy, move policies to use if the
subscriber is unknown to Selected.
The system applies the global policy to all subscribers in parallel with the
subscriber policies, and must be configured with unknown subscriber policy. High-precedence global policies override conflicting subscriber
policies, and low-precedence policies are overridden by conflicting subscriber
policies.
-
To connect to a PCRF, from the Diameter Endpoint list, select
Enabled and select Gx from the
Supported Apps options.
-
In the Product Name field, type the product name which is used
to communicate with the PCRF.
-
In the Origin Host field, type the fully qualified domain name
of the PCRF or external policy server, for example, ocs.xnet.com.
-
In the Origin Realm field, type the realm name or network in
which the PCRF resides, for example, xnet.com.
-
In the Destination Host field, type the destination host name of
the PCRF or external policy server, for example, pcrfdest.net.com.
-
In the Destination Realm field, type the realm name or network
of the PCRF, for example, net.com.
-
For the Pool Member Configuration setting, add the PCRF servers
that are to be members of the Gx endpoint pool. Type the Member IP
Address and Port number, then click
Add.
-
In the Message Retransmit Delay field, type the number of
milliseconds to wait before retransmitting unanswered messages in case of failure from the
BIG-IP system to the PCRF over the Gx interface. The default value is
1500.
-
In the Message Max Retransmit field, type the maximum number of
times that messages can be retransmitted from the BIG-IP system to the PCRF. The default
value is 2.
-
In the Fatal Grace Time field, type the time period in seconds
that a diameter connection can remain disconnected before the system terminates all
sessions associated with that diameter endpoint. The default value is
500.
-
Click Finished.
The Policy Enforcement Manager creates a listener, and displays the listener
list.
When you create a listener, the Policy Enforcement Manager also
creates virtual servers for each type of traffic (TCP, UDP, or both), and a virtual
server for HTTP traffic. The system sets up classification and assigns the appropriate
policy enforcement profile to the virtual servers. The system also creates a virtual
server for the Gx interface with a diameter endpoint profile. If you are connecting to a
RADIUS authentication server, a virtual server for RADIUS is also added.