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Service Provider Maximizes Visibility in Mobile Networks

Case Studies

Saves CAPEX and OPEX Costs

 

This mobile service provider is a leading provider of communications and digital entertainment services in the United States and the world. Introducing new services in the network to grow subscriber base while avoiding customer churn is key to them. The network team at this Tier 1 provider monitors the mobility network to support key corporate goals in the areas of service assurance and quality of experience. For months, they searched for a solution that could provide visibility to their network infrastructure.

 

Challenge

 

A key challenge was to analyze the performance of the provider’s mobile network. They wanted to achieve this without creating processing overhead and requiring multiple SPAN ports.

Another challenge was to find an improved solution to correlate GTP session data, which provides a complete picture of subscriber’s activity across the radio access and core networks. The customer’s current solution was performed by specialized devices known as monitoring probes. Probes spent 50% of their CPU capacity and memory to correlate user data between themselves instead of generating important KPIs. As the network grew, due to increased demand for data, the existing probes were not able to keep up with traffic explosion, necessitating more probe infrastructure, and escalating CAPEX costs. The time to troubleshoot issues with monitoring probe also increased.

 

Customer Conducts Proof of Concept

 

To find a solution to these challenges, the network team decided to conduct a proof of concept of several vendors’ solutions to measure their effectiveness. They wanted to see if deploying a GTP session monitoring solution would accurately correlate each of the subscriber data sessions. The tests proved that Keysight’s GTP solution can correlate subscriber sessions accurately and monitor high volume GTP sessions without  dropping packets.

 

Vision ONE Maximizes Visibility, Reduces MTTR

 

To analyze the performance, the provider needed detailed and accurate information from all parts of the network.  Keysight’s Vision ONE provided access to all the network traffic. The Vision ONEs were deployed in the Evolved Packet Core and Access Networks of the provider’s Data Centers, Regional Data/Technology Centers, FEMTO Cells, Metro Cells, and in Managed Services solutions.  Vision ONE’s data manipulation capabilities ensured the delivery of the right traffic to the right tool, greatly improving network performance. And the Flow Distribution Module reduced the need for expensive monitoring probes by load balancing GTP flows based on probe capacity. Additionally, the packet capture & decode/analysis capability was used to reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).

 

Results

 

Deploying  Keysight’s solutions helped achieve all the key objectives for the provider. The  Vision ONEs helped analyze the performance of the mobile networks by eliminating the blind spots. The GSCs reduced the CAPEX costs associated with monitoring probes by up to 50%, eliminating needless infrastructure. Further, the load on monitoring probes was reduced 30-40%, by moving the session correlation processing to GSC. Both the  Vision ONE and GSC helped reduce the MTTR network probe issues. When the network traffic increased, the architecture was built to scale with it, by simply adding GSC rather than probes and tools.

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