CloudLens – Optimized Monitoring for Mobile Carriers

Earlier this decade, mobile carriers began virtualizing their networks, including the EPC, to meet the extended needs of IoT and reduce the costs of dedicated hardware. Most deployments began small, with simple services like Domain Name Servers (DNS), but carriers are now migrating to virtualize the entire Evolved Packet Core (vEPC).

Deploying network function virtualization enables a smoother move to 5G, as virtualization serves as the foundation for further advancement. Virtualization is growing so quickly that ABI Research forecasts spending for vEPC "will exceed that of physical network functions by 2019, topping $8 billion by 2021."

To gain visibility into this new environment, network operators need a solution that enables specialized subscriber-aware monitoring in both virtual and physical deployments. That's no easy task.

As traffic continues to grow exponentially year over year, network operators cannot cost-effectively manage QoS and QoE just by scaling out their existing monitoring probe infrastructure. If a standard network packet broker load-balances the traffic, virtual or physical monitoring probes must communicate among themselves to correlate control and data plane packets to successfully capture traffic from individual subscribers across their network. This creates problems, because an individual subscriber's experience is difficult to assess as they move between cell towers.

Using a standard packet broker requires every probe to be aware of all sessions from a control plane perspective. That significantly impacts performance, as up to 50% of a probe's capacity is used to correlate packets between probes. This proves a significant cost to operators because it limits resources for network monitoring and visibility into user experience and QoS.

The GTP Session Controller (GSC) is the first dedicated solution to deliver subscriber-aware visibility for physical environments with MobileStack capabilities. However, CloudLens with MobileStack goes a step further and extends these capabilities to monitor traditional, virtual, or hybrid EPC.

MobileStack capabilities are designed to meet the unique, specialized visibility needs of EPC, providing a virtual solution for the virtual and hybrid network. Subscriber-aware capabilities for CloudLens include GTP session correlation, GTP load balancing, and subscriber-aware filtering. Additional support, including device-aware filtering, location-aware filtering, EPC parameter-based filtering, and subscriber sampling, is expected to roll out soon.

With CloudLens, mobile operators keep their subscribers satisfied by scaling out their virtual probe infrastructure to monitor both QoS and QoE with better visibility.