MATRIXX Traffic Routing Agent

Traffic Routing Agents

Depending on how you deploy and configure TRAs, they:

• Serve as a single point of entry to TCP network traffic coming into the MATRIXX Engine for processing.
• Provide high-availability protection for the single point of entry. Because they are always deployed in HA pairs, if one TRA node fails, its HA peer takes over its functions.
• Route traffic from network nodes to the appropriate MATRIXX Engine, based on information in the message.
• Load balance the traffic from network nodes among the MATRIXX Engine processing blades.
• Provide high-availability protection for the MATRIXX Engine while ensuring that messages are always processed by an active engine.
• Send response messages back to the network or to the client applications as necessary.
• Accept either IPv4 or IPv6 traffic.

MATRIXX Digital Commerce supports these TRA functions:

• TRA-(SI/DR) — Routes traffic to a MATRIXX Engine sub-domain.

  In a MATRIXX environment with multiple customer sub-domains, the TRA-RT identifies and routes Diameter, CAP, and SubMan network traffic requests to the correct customer domain for processing. The TRA-RT obtains the necessary routing information from the routing database (Route Cache) that runs on its server, and can handle MDC and Diameter cache-misses. The Route Cache and its associated processes are included in the TRA RPM.

  If your MATRIXX Digital Commerce implementation only uses one customer sub-domain, you do not need a TRA-RT or Route Cache.

• TRA-SI — (Site Independence - Application Layer Protocol) Routes traffic to a MATRIXX Engine. Use this or a TRA-DR.

  The TRA-SI routes TCP or UDP traffic to the active sub-domain. If your MATRIXX Digital Commerce implementation includes multiple customer sub-domains, you typically install and configure one TRA with the combined roles of an TRA-RT-(SI/DR).

• TRA-DR — (Disaster Recovery - Protocol Layer 4) Includes the same functionality as a TRA-SI and can also act as a Diameter peer to answer Capabilities-Exchange-Request messages. Use this or TRA-SI. For more information about using TRA disaster recovery features, see the discussion about MATRIXX Traffic Routing DR features.
• TRA-PROC and TRA-PROC with RCP — (Load Balancer for processing blades) Routes traffic among the MATRIXX Engine processing blades.

  The TRA-PROC load balances traffic between the processing blades of the engine it serves. The TRA-PROC is usually collocated on two of the processing blade servers on a MATRIXX Engine. Each engine (active and standby) is assigned its own TRA-PROC cluster. The TRA-PROC with RCP load balances traffic among processing blades if sub-domain routing is used.

• TRA-PUB — (Traffic router for publishing blades) Routes event streaming traffic and internal MDC traffic to the active MATRIXX Engine publishing blade. The TRA-PUB HA pair is collocated on the MATRIXX Engine; one runs on each of the publishing blades.

Figure 1 shows the various TRA functions and their management and data network connections with other components of MATRIXX Digital Commerce.