Diameter runs over a reliable transport,
TCP or SCTP.
Lost packets are retransmitted at each hop.
A persistent connection with an application-level
heartbeat message (called a Watchdog message) supports timely failover.
TCP and SCTP adapt to network congestion.
Better Proxying
Hop-by-hop transport failure detection
allows failover to occur at the appropriate place—proxies
can locally failover to an alternate next-hop peer.
The proxy automatically does retransmission of pending
request messages following a failover.
An A-V pair that identifies the ultimate destination
allows multiple transactions for a given session to be routed to
the same home server.
Better Session
Control
Session management is independent
of accounting. Accounting information can be routed to a different server
than authentication/authorization messages. Session termination
is conveyed by a specific Session-Termination message rather than
an Accounting Stop message.
The server may initiate a message to request session
termination.
The server may initiate a message to request re-authentication
and/or reauthorization of a user.
Better Security
Hop-by-hop security is provided
using IPsec or TLS.
End-to-end security protects the integrity and/or
confidentiality of sensitive A-V pairs through intermediate proxies.
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