PCRF Performance: Openet vs. Comverse Vs. Others

Both Openet and Comverse provided some information on their PCRF product performance. Both vendors show the same performance on the system (chassis) level, 200,000 TPS (assuming similar test definitions conditions and methods were used).

Some other vendors provided their numbers earlier - Tango Telecom, BroadHop (now Cisco) and Bridgewater Systems (now Amdocs) - each claiming to have the best results.

See below a short comparison of all tests published so far. Test scenarios,conditions and hardware configuration/cost are not the same in all tests. Probably even the definitions of TPS (or PDP contexts setups by some vendors) are not equal as well.

See also "Heavy Reading - '[performance boosted] policy management can play a vital role a telco’s overall product and service strategy'" - here.

Vendor	Date Published	Tester	System Performance (TPS)	Subscribers/ System	Blade Performance	Blog Post
Openet	Jan 9, 2013	Internal	200,000		25,000
Comverse	Jan 9, 2013	EANTC	200,000	31.5M	15,000
Tango Telecom	February 6, 2012	Internal	192,000		12,000	Here
Cisco (BroadHop)	November 17,2010	EANTC	28,000	20M		Here
Amdocs (Bridgewater)	September 15, 2010	EANTC				Here

Back to the recent announcements:

Openet announced that "Technical innovation by Openet engineers related to protocol handling, core processing, and memory utilization have achieved up to 100 percent performance improvement:

• More than double PCRF performance. Openet engineering advances achieved more than 200,000 TPS within a single policy system in lab testing. This measurement includes the in-memory database interaction and represents more than double performance versus any other policy product on the market.
   
• More than 25,000 TPS per blade for rating decisions. Openet’s product ecosystem includes real-time charging integrated with policy, essential to help operators create, manage and support modern business models.
  
  See "Openet Technical Breakthroughs Exceed Performance Standards" - here.  

Comverse provides test results "Conducted by the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) ..Test results indicate that the DMM Policy Manager is distinguished by having the highest independently proven transactions per second (TPS) figures in the industry per single chassis: 

• Verified 31.5 million simultaneously active subscribers in a single DMM Policy Manager chassis
   
• Measured more than 200,000 transactions per second in a single DMM Policy Manager chassis in all scenarios, including advanced LTE use case
   
• Support of 15,000 TPS per blade with linear scalability
   

         See "Independent Testing Confirms Comverse Mobile Internet Performance Leadership" - here.