See Inside Your 5G Core

Summary

5G networks—and the social streaming apps they support—demand ultra-low latency and high security. 5G’s SDN architecture and unprecedented traffic volumes require operators’ monitoring infrastructure to transform as well, extending visibility across physical, virtual, and hybrid network infrastructures.

The new mobile core distributes encrypted content to the edge for rapid subscriber access. The core is both dynamic and encrypted making it difficult to access data needed for troubleshooting quality of service (QoS). Monitoring probes need a steady stream of packets that cannot be captured by traditional physical taps. Additionally, 5G core data is highly encrypted, which makes accessing data more challenging.

Challenges

Challenges around security and scale can be overcome by integrating vTAPs with a shared visibility fabric. Along with the usual aggregation of traffic flows and pre-processing of data (de-duplication, filtering, load-balancing, sampling), the network packet broker (NPB) must decrypt traffic and provide event sequencing and health metrics. The common fabric further promotes scale by allowing operators to upgrade probes without changing the underlying monitoring architecture.

Use case

This use case looks specifically at the architecture and how to integrate an advanced visibility platform by providing an integrated, highly automated visibility fabric for accessing 5G core data using Network Function Providers’ vTAPs and preparing traffic for new and existing monitoring probes.

NEMs vTAPs

To unlock access to core network data, network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) like Nokia and Ericsson built their own virtual tapping (vTAP) solutions that capture 5G packets. These solutions can handle encryption but each vTAP has its own encapsulation methods with varying requirements for ingesting data.

Advanced visibility platform

Challenges around security and scale can be overcome by integrating vTAPs with a shared visibility fabric. Along with the usual aggregation of traffic flows and pre-processing of data (de-duplication, filtering, load-balancing, sampling), the network packet broker (NPB) must decrypt traffic and provide event sequencing and health metrics. The common fabric further promotes scale by allowing operators to upgrade probes without changing the underlying monitoring architecture.

Aggregation

Keysight provides the most flexible and innovative capabilities for accessing the 5G Core. 5G includes important new security features, making packet access challenging, especially given the variety of possible vendor, technology, and infrastructure choices. To address these challenges, Keysight offers flexible options for 5G encrypted packet access, including SCP proxy and service mesh integration, network function virtual taps including integrations with Ericsson PCC, Oracle DataDirector, and vendor[1]independent virtual taps. 5G visibility from Keysight terminates, processes, and forwards 5G traffic to probes, ensuring scalability, flexibility, and operational efficiency.

Processing

5G correlation, filtering, sampling, and slice awareness provide valuable insights into network performance and traffic patterns. These features allow for efficient management of large amounts of data, improved decision-making, and enhanced visibility into 5G network performance. By leveraging these capabilities, organizations can optimize their network performance, reduce costs, and improve service quality for end-users.

Forwarding – metadata and analytics

Keysight visibility enables you to get more out of your investment by providing innovative subscriber[1]aware metadata, generating deeper insights into your network performance and subscriber behavior. Keysight metadata provides valuable context and insight, including information such as mobility parameters, per-flow transport KPI’s, and application-level traffic performance KPI’s. With Keysight's subscriber-based metadata, service providers gain a more comprehensive understanding of network performance and identify issues that may not be apparent, or may not be cost-effective to produce, with standard packet-based visibility. This metadata can be processed for anomaly detection and other analytics and forwarded on various event streaming busses like Kafka and Pulsar.

Probes and NetOps – Enriched data services

Enriched data services for probes and network operations refer to the process of collecting network telemetry data including IP flows and raw packets from a variety of network devices. This data is then processed to gain deep insight for troubleshooting, UX monitoring, security, etc., and stored for further analysis and reporting. Dedicated proprietary probes can be used to improve performance, increase data granularity, and enrich the flow data with L7 information. Filtered OSS and BSS data (from distributed 5G core) can be processed and used to deliver data-driven standalone applications or data-enriched external service portfolios.