Maintaining 3G and 4G/LTE Quality of Service

// White Paper
The Smart Route To Visibility

Monitoring and Maintaining the Quality of Service during the Evolution of Network infrastructure
The world is changing quickly, and never more so than in the domain of communications. With the demarcation between social and business communications all but gone, the subscriber expectations continue to drive significant pressure on infrastructure to deliver increasing scale, increasing reach, and increasing performance with improved quality. Certainly this could be described as a perfect storm but after every storm clear-skies return. In this case the demands of scale, reach, performance and quality are the new baseline, the new norm of the global communications environment. With the rise in employee mobility and the notable improvement in applications and services that empower and enable the mobile worker, the expectations for anytime, anywhere access to communications will continue to accelerate. The extended enterprise (in other words, the services and infrastructure that extend beyond the four-walls of the enterprise itself) create increasing opportunity and potential for Service Providers around the globe. Unfortunately at the same time the next generation of subscriber is now in the workforce and their allegiance to one Service Provider over another is established or destroyed based upon the quality of the last call, the last interaction or the last provisioning/billing event. It is therefore critical that Service Provider infrastructure and services extend to serve the enterprise of the future, but do so while enhancing and maintaining the service quality.

The move towards LTE

Global, national and regional Service Providers are deploying High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) services and basing the delivery upon 3G and 4G infrastructure. As 3G is now clearly established and enjoying a phase of mainstream leadership, the evolution in the radio and core network space continues with Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Evolved Packet System (EPS) leading the way forward to the 4G revolution. The 3G infrastructure of today was the first platform that provided the anytime, anywhere access and entertainment medium and over the medium term, the migration to 4G will deliver the reality of a full multi-media experience for the subscriber. The mobile, medium-definition and high-definition video era, with always on expectations, will drive the next wave of evolution in the Service Provider network infrastructure (4G and LTE) but in the meantime while the performance of the radio migrates from 2G to 3G and then 4G, the core network also has to revive itself with new architecture enhancements in order to keep up with seemingly unrealistic data speeds, call quality expectations and overall expansion.

The 3G Network
The 3G packet core architecture is comprised of a variety of inter-dependent components that in combination create the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System. The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Support Nodes (GSN), the Gateway GSN (GGSN) and the Serving GSN (SGSN) all establish

Maintaining 3G and 4G/LTE Quality of Service

// White Paper
The Smart Route To Visibility

an interface between the radio system and fixed networks for packet-switched services. The reliable, stable and scalable performance of all of these is critical to ensure that service stability and quality is maintained. The SGSN (Serving GPRS Support Node) is a critical component as it supports mobility management functions within the network as it receives signaling and packet data from the access nodes. With many functions being handled by this architecture (including forwarding, tunneling, authentication, signaling and mobility management) the stability and performance directly impacts overall service quality and scale. With all of these discrete systems and components of infrastructure operating in combination to complete service provisioning, call set up, call delivery, call termination and billing, the life of the Service Provider Operations team has taken on a significant degree of complexity. The migration from circuitswitched to packet-switched has introduced new opportunities for more diverse and valuable services, but also created a new wave of complexity and challenge to operate, maintain and sustain the infrastructure of today.

of the quality being impactedin other words, enable a move from reactive to proactive management.

A New Approach to Providing Pervasive Visibility

As the subscriber-driven bandwidth and service demands for Service Providers started to rise, at Gigamon we realized that a different approach was going to be required to ensure that the management and monitoring of 2G, 3G, 4G and beyond networks would both scale in capability but also enable a transition of management from reactive to proactive. Following the approach of the past and deploying specific and very localized management technologies to track packets and calls as they pass a specific point within the environment was clearly a solution of the past and instead providing an architecture that offered pervasive visibility was required.

P Maerfor na ma ge nc me e nt

Ma Netw na or ge k me nt

Sustaining Call Quality

In the world of circuit-switched, when call-setup was completed the quality of the call was reasonably easy to assess, measure and support. In the packet-switched world a new range of challenges arose that require a fundamentally different approach. With the move to packet-switched transport, jitter, latency and packet QoS all directly, and potentially adversely, impact the experience of the subscriber through reduced call quality, reliability and stability. To be able to understand, monitor and measure these critical attributes of voice traffic on a packetbackbone, pervasive visibility provides a powerful ally to enable reach and insight into potentially harmful characteristics ahead

Visibility Fabric
Data Voice Video
Figure (1)

Gigamon released the GigaVUE Traffic Visibility Fabric that

establishes a service provider grade scalable framework, utilizing purpose built appliances to increase the efficiency of monitoring and security tools. It establishes a visualization layer between the network and monitoring tools so that traffic on the production packet-switched network can be intelligently replicated to the monitoring/management tool that can then

Ma Ser na vic ge e me nt

Inf ra Se stru cu ctu rity re

R Co egul mp ato lia ry nc e

Maintaining 3G and 4G/LTE Quality of Service

// White Paper
The Smart Route To Visibility

insightfully use the information. The Traffic Visibility Fabric enables engineers to deploy monitoring appliances wherever and whenever they are required. Moves, adds and changes to the visibility configuration can be easily performed without requiring any physical configuration changes or creating additional load on the production network. Figure 1 shows the basic concept of a visibility fabric. The fabric delivers pervasive visibility of the millions of flows, thousands of events and hundreds of changes that occur within the increasingly complex infrastructure in real time. Additionally, the visibility fabric can prioritize critical traffic flows over nonessential ones, it can select one call over another, one application over another, and in doing so truly optimize the management and monitoring of information. With the visibility fabric in place, monitoring and security tools that were limited by the number of connection points or inundated with the volume of traffic, can now deliver their full value by providing end-to-end cell-tower to core network visibility. With this new found breadth of visibility, Service Provider Operations and Management groups can create a detailed analysis of performance impacting events, can transition from reactive to proactive and can use the reach of the fabric to avoid the on-going operational cost, delay and complexity of a truck-roll. If the fabric has the reach, Operational personnel can dynamically select traffic flows from remote locations and connect those flows to centralized tool and management systems to evaluate stability, quality or scale issues.

Mapping filters, intelligently segregates the data into different logical groupings, so that traffic matching either very specific or very broad parameters is forwarded on to management and monitoring systems. In addition, traffic can be duplicated if one specific stream of traffic is relevant to more than one management tool, or the traffic can be truncated if only a portion of the packet is relevant to the specific analysis underway. For example, to understand top talkers across a network, only the first 128 bytes of a packet are relevant and the remainder can be discarded. In doing so, a reasonably low-bandwidth tool can monitor a high performance backbone or network segment. The GigaSTACK software solution enables several discrete visibility nodes to be combined into a single manage as one fabric via an intuitive browser-based management UI. Armed with the pervasive visibility made available by Gigamons Traffic Visibility Fabric, monitoring, management and compliance tools can enable service providers to reliably monitor and manage their 2G and 3G networks, and then use the pervasive visibility to assist in the accurate design and engineering of the next generation 4G and LTE networks.

Conclusion
Gaining subscriber-level intelligence into the performance of the network, understanding usage, performance and consumption trends is key to improving the overall Quality of Experience of the end-user. Our Visibility Fabric will help overcome the final hurdle to meeting your goalsachieving network visibilityby providing you with a proactive approach that does not strain your budget. Enjoy the following benefits and peace of mind as you roll out your visibility fabric: Extended visibility enables proactive identification of poor performance impacting high value accounts and identifying offending subscribers. Eliminate SPAN/mirror port contention allowing you to easily replicate the appropriate data to

Visibility of calls establishes new opportunity to improve Subscriber Intelligence

Using the Gigamon Visibility Fabric, traffic streams flowing across the 3G and 4G core networks can be tapped and/or mirrored into the Gigamon Visibility Fabric where the streams are filtered and aggregated before being replicated into management tools including Performance Monitors, Service Monitors or Network Monitors. Gigamons unique patented Flow

Maintaining 3G and 4G/LTE Quality of Service

// White Paper
The Smart Route To Visibility

multiple tools at the same time in order to eliminate data blind spots. Quickly introduce new tools and monitor new applications without having to wait for lengthy change managementprocesses in order to address dynamic business needs. Ability to prioritize traffic at the flow, packet or application level, giving you the ability to send the right information to the right tool for optimum visibility and clarity. Predict when service is degrading, allowing your team to fix the problem before users call about it. Provides traffic filtering capability to reduce the amount of data being sent to a tool, which allows you to reduce cost by using/re-using tools to monitor multiple links.

About Gigamon
Gigamon provides intelligent Traffic Visibility Networking solutions for enterprises, data centers and service providers around the globe. Our technology empowers infrastructure architects, managers and operators with unmatched visibility into the traffic traversing both physical and virtual networks without affecting the performance or stability of the production environment. Through patented technologies, the Gigamon GigaVUE portfolio of high availability and high density products intelligently delivers the appropriate network traffic to security, monitoring or management systems. With over seven years experience designing and building intelligent traffic visibility products in the US, Gigamon serves the vertical market leaders of the Fortune 1000 and has an install base spanning 40 countries. For more information about our Gigamon products visit:

www.gigamon.com

Copyright 2012 Gigamon, LLC. All rights reserved. Gigamon, GigaVUE, GigaSMART, G-TAP, Flow Mapping are registered trademarks of Gigamon, LLC and/or affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. Visibility Fabric, Traffic Visibility Fabric (TVF), Citrus, and The Smart Route To Visibility are trademarks of Gigamon. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Gigamon | 598 Gibraltar Drive Milpitas, CA 95035 | PH 408.263.2022 | www.gigamon.com