Call Summary Log is a mechanism using which subscriber activities like Session Creation/Deletion, Bearer Creation/Update/Deletion is reported to an external server.

For more information, refer to the CP Call Summary Log chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS Control Plane Administration Guide and UP Call Summary Log chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS User Plane Administration Guide.

To provide IMS services to the UE that aren't VOLTE capable, P-GW uses the deep packet inspection (DPI) functionality to create dedicated bearers without interaction with PCRF. This helps in maintaining high QoS of the voice service although the default bearer for the internet APN gets created with interaction with PCRF.

SBC IP address (IPv4 or IPv6) and protocol RTP/RTCP are configured in ruledef and a dedicated bearer is created when a subscriber traffic matches with the ruledef without interaction with PCRF to detect voice services. If no data flows, then the dedicated bearer gets removed after the configured time limit and there's no interaction with PCRF.

For more information, refer to the Dedicated Bearer Establishment chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS Control Plane Administration Guide or the Ultra Packet Core CUPS User Plane Administration Guide.

Subscriber Firewall feature on CUPS architecture allows you to configure Stateless and Stateful packet inspection and packet filtering to protect the subscribers from malicious attacks. The firewall configuration allows the system to inspect each packet of the subscriber data session. It also evaluates the security threat and applies the policies configured on uplink and downlink traffic.

For more information, refer to the Firewall Support in CUPS chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS Control Plane Administration Guide or the Ultra Packet Core CUPS User Plane Administration Guide.

The "NSH Traffic Steering—Sandwich Mode" caters to the NSH-based Traffic Steering (TS) approach to provide the metadata needed by the service function appliance's Forwarding Engine (FE) nodes.

The Sandwich Mode solution leverages the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series NX-OS Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) in the Cisco USP instance.

For more information, refer to the NSH Traffic Steering chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS Control Plane Administration Guide or the Ultra Packet Core CUPS User Plane Administration Guide.

With this release, the RedHat OpenStack Platform version 16.1 (Train) has been validated and recommended for use with CUPS deployments.

The Redundancy Configuration Manager (RCM) is a Cisco proprietary node/network function (NF) that provides redundancy of StarOS-based UPs. The RCM provides N:M redundancy of UPs wherein “N” is number of Active UPs and is less than 10, and “M” is number of Standby UPs in the redundancy group.

For more information, refer to the Redundancy Configuration Manager Configuration and Administration Guide.

CUPS supports backward compatibility of software releases on Control Plane (CP) and User Plane (UP). The feature allows seamless upgrade/downgrade of the software from/to previous release (N-1)/(N-2). The functionality includes support for the following:

• N-1/N-2 compatibility of software releases on two CPs in ICSR mode—allows seamless upgrade of CPs from one version to another in CP 1:1 redundancy scenario.

• N-1/N-2 compatibility of software releases on two UPs in ICSR mode—allows seamless upgrade of UPs from one version to another in UP 1:1 redundancy scenario.

• N-1/N-2 compatibility of software releases between CP and UP—allows seamless upgrade of the associated CP or UP from one version to another.

• N-1 compatibility of software releases between CP and UP with multi-Sx—allows seamless upgrade of the associated CP or UP from one version to another in multi-Sx scenario.

For more information, refer to the Software Management Operations chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS Control Plane Administration Guide or the Ultra Packet Core CUPS User Plane Administration Guide.

With this release, the following customer-specific dictionaries are supported in CUPS:

• P-GW custom54 GTPP Dictionary.

• S-GW custom54 GTPP Dictionary.

For more information, contact your Cisco Account representative.

The Terminal Access Controller Access Control Server Plus (TACACS+) is a security protocol that is used for authenticating user access permissions on StarOS. To secure the authentication data that are sent over TACACS+ client and servers, CUPS VNFs support TACACS+ over IPSec for encrypting the authentication data.

For more information, refer to the TACACS+ Over IPSec chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS Control Plane Administration Guide or the Ultra Packet Core CUPS User Plane Administration Guide.

The User Plane Node Bring-Down Procedure is a Maintenance Operating Procedure (MoP) that outlines the steps to bring down a specific User Plane (UP) node for maintenance operations. The purpose of this procedure is to meet the requirement to disable specific UP node on Control Plane (CP) node while node selection takes place for new incoming sessions.

This feature provides the following functionality:

• Configuration to mark a specific UP unavailable for any new session.

• Option to delete idle subscribers.

For more information, refer to the User Plane Node Bring-Down Procedure chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS Control Plane Administration Guide or the Ultra Packet Core CUPS User Plane Administration Guide.

Access Point Name (APN) is a logical name referring to an external packet data network and/or to a specific service that the subscriber wishes to connect to.

Virtual APNs allow differentiated services within a single APN.

The Virtual APN feature allows a carrier to use a single APN to configure differentiated services. The APN that is supplied by the MME is evaluated by the P-GW along with multiple configurable parameters. Then, the P-GW selects an APN configuration that is based on the supplied APN and those configurable parameters.

For more information, refer to the Virtual APN in CUPS chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS Control Plane Administration Guide or the Ultra Packet Core CUPS User Plane Administration Guide.

The VRF Support for CUPS feature enables association of IP pools with virtual routing and forwarding (VRF). These IP pools are chunked like any pools. The chunks from this pool are allocated to the User Planes (UPs) that are configured to use these pools. As in the existing deployment, VRF-associated pools in CUPS can only be of type—STATIC or PRIVATE.

The chunks from the PRIVATE VRF pool are allocated when the UP comes for registration similar to the normal private pools. The chunks from the STATIC VRF pool are allocated only when calls come up for that chunk, similar to normal static pools.

For more information, refer to the VRF Support for CUPS chapter in the Ultra Packet Core CUPS Control Plane Administration Guide or the Ultra Packet Core CUPS User Plane Administration Guide.