Diameter C API and Open Diameter Project

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Diameter C API andOpen Diameter Project

• Yoshihiro Ohba
• Victor Fajardo
• Dilip Patel

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Diameter C API

• Design policy
• Leveraging object-oriented nature of C
• Reuse what is already defined in the C API as
  much as possible
• Document
• draft-ohba-aaa-diameter-cxxapi-00.txt
• Sample code in Appendix

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Why C API?

• Since classes are hierarchically defined, it is
  easy to reuse and extend what is already defined
• C has a built-in exception handling mechanism
  for providing a better way of handling errors
• Better handling of callback functions
• A set of variables and associated functions can
  be passed in a single argument as a pointer to a
  class instance

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Basic Structure of the API

• Element data-type definitions
• No member functions
• Type definitions in the C API are reused
• Parser class definitions
• Classes for assembling/reassembling messages and
  AVPs
• Session/Event/Message Control class definitions
• Classes for handling sessions, events and sending
  messages

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Open Diameter Project

• History
• Open Source Diameter Project created in
  SourceForge in Jan 2002, by David Frascone
• OpenDiameter Project created in Oct 2002 by
  Toshiba America Research, Inc. (TARI)
• The two projects were merged into Open Diameter
  project in Nov 2002
• URL
• http//www.opendiameter.org (project home page)
• http//sourceforge.net/projects/diameter (CVS
  repository, tar archives, ML)
• Source code
• Using the C API, (Java-based implementation is
  also planned)
• Thread-safe
• Using ACE (Adaptive Communication Environment)
  library to archive OS-independency and employ
  typical design patterns
• Using XML for Command AVP dictionary and
  configuration files
• Libraries are under Lesser GPL (LGPL)
• Daemon programs will be under GPL

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Open Diameter Architecture
Timer, signal, thread, connection and
configuration management
The Main Thread
Parser(libdiamparser)
Session Manager(libdiameter)
AVP Container Pool
Per-session Event Serializer

Parser DB

Pool of Threads
TransportRouting Manager(libdiameter)
Per-peer Message Queues

Peer DB
Routing DB

Per-connection Threads
Transport Connections
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• Can the C API be a work item of the WG?
• We believe that the C API (as well as the C
  API) and the Open Diameter project can help the
  community deploy Diameter quickly