PAiCore Technology has released Extended Diameter Routing Agent (DRA) v3.0.0 as open-source software, bringing a Diameter Routing Agent that has been in continuous production service for years to the wider telecom and open-source community.
Released on August 31, 2026, DRA v3.0.0 is available under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license. The release is built on the Diameter Base Protocol defined in IETF RFC 6733 and 3GPP reference points derived from it, with support for 17 Diameter applications across IETF, 3GPP and vendor-defined environments.
Bringing Production-Proven Diameter Technology to the Open-Source Community
Diameter continues to be used for signaling within mobile core and telecom environments.
A Diameter Routing Agent needs to handle more than basic message forwarding. Routing decisions, destination selection, traffic distribution, failure handling and peer management all form part of the routing environment.
With DRA v3.0.0, PAiCore is making these capabilities available to the open-source community.
Flexible Diameter Routing
DRA v3.0.0 provides configurable rule evaluation for incoming Diameter requests.
Rules are evaluated in document order, with support for enabled and default rules. Routing criteria can include Origin-Host, Origin-Realm, Destination-Host, Destination-Realm, Application-Id, IMSI and MSISDN.
The release also provides subscriber identity extraction from supported Diameter message structures. IMSI can be obtained from the 3GPP-IMSI AVP or Subscription-Id, while MSISDN can be resolved from Public-Identity, MSISDN or User-Identity information.
This provides the routing engine with the information required to apply configurable routing rules to different types of Diameter traffic.
Configuration Without Restarting the Node
DRA v3.0.0 includes hot configuration reload through filesystem supervision.
When the routing configuration changes, the complete rule set can be reloaded without restarting the DRA node. Established Diameter associations remain unaffected, and requests already in flight are not lost.
Routing, destination and weight changes can therefore be applied without restarting the node.
The configuration process also follows a fail-fast approach for invalid rule content, preventing the node from serving traffic using a partially loaded routing table.
Traffic Distribution and Destination Selection
DRA v3.0.0 supports destination selection using priority and load-balancing mechanisms.
Destinations can be selected according to configured priority, while hosts sharing the same priority can receive traffic based on configured percentage weights.
The DRA also tracks destinations already attempted during fallback. This prevents a retry from immediately returning traffic to a host that has just failed.
Message Manipulation and Path Recording
The release provides configurable message manipulation capabilities for forwarded Diameter traffic.
Destination-Host and Destination-Realm can be replaced when required, while Origin-Host and Origin-Realm can also be replaced to control the identity presented to downstream nodes.
DRA v3.0.0 also supports Route-Record handling. Route records can be appended as Diameter messages pass through the routing node, supporting path recording and loop detection.
Failure Handling and Transaction Supervision
Failure handling is an important part of Diameter routing.
DRA v3.0.0 provides configurable fallback policies for routing and connectivity failures and other delivery errors. During fallback, destinations that have already been attempted are excluded from subsequent retries.
The release also provides configurable drop policies for situations such as no matching rule, no available routing destination and malformed or invalid Diameter requests.
For transaction supervision, pending requests are correlated using Session-Id and End-to-End Identifier. Transaction supervision also removes entries that remain uncorrelated beyond the configured ageing period, helping prevent abandoned transactions from accumulating.
Peer Management Through the CLI
DRA v3.0.0 provides a CLI management interface for Diameter peers and associations.
Administrators can list, inspect, add, edit, remove, start, stop and reset peers through the management interface without restarting the node.
Changes made through the management interface are also written back to the persisted stack configuration.
Support for 17 Diameter Applications
The release includes command and AVP definitions for 17 Diameter applications.
The supported IETF applications include:
- Diameter Base
- NASREQ
- Diameter Base Accounting
- Diameter Credit-Control
The supported 3GPP reference points include:
- Rf / Ro
- Cx / Dx
- Sh
- Gq
- Gx
- MM10
- Rx
- S6a
- S13 / S13′
- SWm
- S6b
The release also includes the Ericsson Service Charging Application Protocol (19302) as a vendor-defined Diameter application.
Because routing is based on generic AVP matching rather than application-specific routing logic, additional applications can be routed once their definitions are declared.
Open Source Telecom Signaling
DRA v3.0.0 makes these Diameter routing and management capabilities available to developers, telecom engineers, integrators and organisations working with Diameter-based infrastructure.
For PAiCore, the release is part of its broader commitment to open-source telecom signaling, making production-proven technology available for the wider community to explore, evaluate and build upon.
Explore DRA v3.0.0
Latest Version: 3.0.0
Release Date: August 31, 2026
License: AGPL-3.0-or-later
Supported Diameter Applications: 17
Explore the DRA Open Source Repository
Explore PAiCore: https://paicore.tech/
Industry Standards and Technical References
Production-proven Diameter technology, now open source.