Due to the dramatic growth of mobile networks traffic, Telecom operators must upgrade monitoring and security tools because one single probe is not capable anymore to manage all User Plane traffic. Coherent balancing to several Probes is necessary and Microtel Innovation Aster A-640, thanks to its 32 x 100 GB ports, is the right investment for the future.
How to implement User Plane coherent balancing? Using GTP correlation may not be the right solution, because it requires lot of costly computational power. Moreover, it is difficult to implement in modern networks, where Control Plane Traffic and User Plane Traffic are often not in the same location.
Instead, Microtel Innovation Aster A-640 implement coherent balancing without using GTP correlation, and is able to balance User Plane Traffic in a way that all user plane sessions belonging to the same Subscriber are sent to the same Probe. 3G, 4G and 5G Core Network interfaces are supported; Aster A-640 can cope with up to 3,2 TB traffic.
Example: A-640 implementing GTP User Plane coherent balancing
USER PLANE BALANCING WITH ASTER A-640 – CASE HISTORY
THE CHALLENGE
The customer, a Far East Tier1 Mobile operator, asked our support to manage the GTP traffic in a much more efficient way, given the growth it was having in the last period, achieving peak traffic values of 200G/250G in the Core Network sites.
Since the traffic was too much to be managed by one single probe, the Operator’s had to add additional probes, and to find the proper way to feed them: A-640 was the right solution that he was looking for.
Customer request was to feed all probes with the User Plane data, with the need that all traffic related to the same Mobile User has to be sent to the same probe, to grant a proper data analysis.
MICROTEL INNOVATION SOLUTION
To solve the customer issue the technical team proposed Microtel Aster A-640, a powerful L2-L4 advanced packet broker capable of balancing GTP User Plane traffic in a coherent way; both IPv6 and IPv4 are supported. The product is based on the powerful Intel® Tofino chipset. It grants high flexibility and, using its special algorithm (no need for GTP correlation), A-640 can balance and forward specific subscriber sessions to one single tool.
A-640 has been installed, and it allows our customer to split the traffic toward 5 probes.
It receives 200G/250G data traffic during peak hours: input ports 1-2-3-4-7-8 are fed with GTP v2 (4G network) traffic, while input ports 5-6 receive GTP v1 (3G network) data.
Control plane traffic is replicated to all probes. User plane traffic is balanced in a coherent way to the 5 Probes the customer just installed: all sessions belonging to a single subscriber are sent to the same probe.
Solution: A-640 implementing GTP User Plane coherent balancing towards 5 customer Probes
