As already described in the section Signaling Survivability, you cannot operate an access point unless the signaling connection is working properly.

The concept for monitoring the signaling connection uses the additional monitoring connection to verify if communication is basically possible between CC and an access point. The main advantage of this is that you can respond very quickly and activate signaling survivability in the event of a crash on the IP connection between CC and the access point.

The IP connection between the CC and access point is sometimes not completely severed, “just“ severely restricted. This can have an extremely negative impact on the signaling function without this malfunction being detected by the separate monitoring connection.

To eliminate this restriction, we have introduced a new mechanism for monitoring the actual signaling connection to complement the mechanism already described and based on a separate monitoring connection.

This additional functionality is split into five components: