Why do you need subscriber aware visibility?
As a mobile network carrier, how can you drive your revenue growth? The three main challenges faced by a service provider include retention of existing subscribers, offering better products to new subscribers and conducting centralized monitoring and troubleshooting of the network. Better visibility into the user network traffic leads to higher level of customer satisfaction. In addition to providing good service to all the customers, the mobile network carriers also want to specifically focus on their top customers who bring them more revenue. This provides them a competitive edge in today’s environment where subscribers have several options to choose from. Despite the increasing volume, velocity and variety of traffic, how does your existing monitoring system handle the entire traffic and provide you subscriber aware visibility?
The Cubro Network Probe can help the service provider by providing these visibility solutions. The probe has the ability to store all protocol messages, the exchange between network elements of a specific network and provides complete metadata of the user plane traffic.
Separation of user plane and control plane and forwarding of control plane
First, we separate signalling traffic and user traffic
The signalling traffic is forwarded to the existing monitoring system and is processed there
The load on the signalling is low and even when the user load is growing the load on the signalling does not grow in the same way. The signalling is more when there are more users, and it is not related to the bandwidth
IMSI filtering for user plane
In the second step, the user traffic can be filtered
There are many options where we can filter to reduce the load. For instance, IMSI, IMEI, APN, Network Element Filtering, CELL ID and more
It is possible to filter on a million IMSIs per unit. This can be used to monitor only gold customers or to monitor oncapture specific – IMSI for special purposes like lawful interception (LI) and deep packet inspection (DPI).
User plane XDR generation
We can produce metadata XDRs for “all” user data traffic. These XDRs hold a matrix of relevant information coming from the network
These XDRs can be filtered to reduce the load
The interval of the XDRs can be configured per session and per time to deliver the needed granularity of the information. The XDR is an open format to support any database
Why use Cubro Probe?
- Results in lower Capex and Opex due to fewer hardware resources
- Availability of complete metadata of the user plane traffic
- Ability to store all protocol messages, the exchange between network elements of a specific network
- Reduces monitoring cost by offloading the existing monitoring system
The standard network visibility products can store protocol messages without any enrichment in raw format. As a network engineer, if you are interested in analysing troubles and finding the protocol message flow caused by a particular user equipment, the device would not be sufficient. You will get only those protocol messages where user identification is part of the message, and the rest is hidden. This is a significant concern because the rest of the message is stored but not assigned by the equipment. Using Probes for network monitoring can solve this challenge. Probes have intelligent algorithms to enrich protocol messages by user equipment identification – IMSI, IMEI, APN, Network Element Filtering, CELL ID and more. All these can identify a single subscriber and lead to centralized monitoring and troubleshooting of the network.
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IMSI filtering with Cubro Sessionmaster