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Using an external policy server with Pexip Infinity

Pexip Infinity's external policy feature allows call policy decisions to be taken by an external system, based on the data sources that are available to that system. This allows Pexip Infinity administrators to implement routing decisions based on their specific requirements.

When external policy is enabled, rather than using its own database and systems to retrieve service and participant data, Pexip Infinity Conferencing Nodes send the external policy server a service request (a GET request over HTTP or HTTPS) and the server should respond by returning the requested data to the Conferencing Node.

Currently, Pexip Infinity makes requests to an external policy server to obtain service configuration data, media location requirements, and to retrieve jpeg avatars to represent participants in a conference. In the future, we expect Pexip Infinity to make use of external policy servers for other aspects of call processing decision-making.

You can configure Pexip Infinity to use a different policy server per system location. The requests can be subject to basic username and password authentication.

The policy requests supported in Pexip Infinity version 11 are:

  • Service configuration: to obtain details of a service, typically when Pexip Infinity is receiving or placing a call, or showing the status of a conference alias.
  • Media location: to obtain the system location to use for media allocation for a conference participant.
  • Participant avatar: to obtain the image to display to represent a conference participant, for example in the participant list in the Infinity Connect client.

When a policy server has been configured, a Conferencing Node that needs to obtain service information will in the first instance always attempt to request information from the policy server associated with the location hosting that node. If the policy server does not return the expected service information e.g. the policy server cannot be reached, times out or returns invalid or incomplete data, Pexip Infinity will then attempt to obtain the relevant information from its own internal database.

Configuring Pexip Infinity to use an external policy server

You must configure Pexip Infinity with the details of one or more external policy servers to which it can send policy requests. You do this by configuring the addresses of one or more external policy server URLs and then associating each system location with a single policy server URL. This means that different locations can use different policy servers for scalability and routing efficiency, if required. For redundancy, you may also use a http load balancer in front of a pool of policy servers.

We recommend that each policy server uses the same underlying decision-making logic or database, so that consistent responses are returned. However, the policy servers can apply different rules on a per-location basis, if required, as the requesting location is one of the parameters passed to the policy server in policy requests.

To configure Pexip Infinity to use an external policy server:

  1. Go to Call control > Policy servers.
  2. Configure one or more policy servers, as appropriate. The options are:

    OptionDescription
    NameThe name used to refer to this policy server in the Pexip Infinity Administrator interface.
    DescriptionAn optional description of the policy server.
    URL

    The URL of the policy server, for example https://policy.example.com/path.

    You can only configure one address URL per policy server.

    If the request is over HTTPS, Pexip Infinity must trust the certificate presented by the policy server.

    Username

    Password

    Optional fields where you can specify the credentials required to access the external policy server.

  3. Go to Platform configuration > Locations.
  4. Select each location in turn and specify the Policy server that the location should use when making policy decisions.

    You must ensure that each Conferencing Node in that location is able to reach the nominated policy server.

Note that you can also use the management API to configure external policy servers and locations.

Policy server requests and responses

For specific information about the requests sent by Pexip Infinity to an external policy server and the responses that Pexip Infinity expects to receive in return, see: