User Plane Monitoring for a Mobile Network Operator (MNO)

User plane monitoring is a hot topic these days. It is not only important and useful for the technical purpose, but it is also possible to generate additional revenue for the MNO. The flip side of the coin is the price, and complexity of performing this application.

Cubro offers a cost-effective solution for this challenge. The solution is the Cubro Probes, and the advanced load balancing feature of the EXA32100. The combination of these two devices helps to reduce the costs and enhance the performance of customers who have an existing control plane monitoring solution. Several major MNOs use Cubro solution to add the user plane monitoring to off-load the existing control plane monitoring.

The Challenges:

Monitoring user plane in LTE networks involves these challenges:

• ​Traffic growth/volume
• Legal issues
• High costs
• Complicated network architecture

The Cubro solution 

• ​Traffic filtering on user IP address
• Traffic filtering on subscriber’s IMSI and MSISDN
• GTP tunnel removal for monitoring
• Generation of XDRs and CDRs which are sent to the Big Data

The solutions to this issue are not to monitor the user plane but instead filter and monitor only specific users/devices. Filtering on a particular customer in a highly loaded LTE network is difficult and expensive. However, Cubro offers solutions which can maximise your return on investment. With the advanced features of Cubro EXA32100 and EXA48600 platform in combination with EXA24160 and the technologies from the Cubro probing business, the user can solve this issue. Cubro offers a combined solution to do IMSI filtering on highly loaded networks which provide customer satisfaction and reduces costs of monitoring.

GTP Inner IP range filtering

Cubro G5 devices (EXA32100 and EXA48600) are the only network packet brokers on the market which can do inner IP filtering in hardware at full line speed.

Cubro offers the most cost-efficient solution.  Usually, the S1U interfaces are the most loaded on a mobile network. Other Vendors can do this task only in expensive CPU solutions whereas Cubro devices can do up to multiple TB inner IP range and unique IP filtering & load balancing. The EXA32100 provides all kinds of relevant interface for this task (32 x 100 Gbit, 32 x 40 Gbit, 128 x 25 Gbit, 128 x 10 Gbit).

A simple and scalable solution to offload irrelevant traffic from the probes and save costs

GTP inner IP range load balancing

Cubro G5 devices (EXA32100 and EXA48600) are the only network packet brokers on the market which can do GTP inner IP load balancing in hardware at full line speed.

Cubro offers the most cost-efficient solution. Usually, the S1U interfaces are the most loaded on a mobile network. Other Vendors can do this task only in expensive CPU solutions. However, Cubro devices can do up to multiple TB inner IP range and unique IP filtering & load balancing. The EXA32100 provides all kinds of relevant interface for this task (32 x 100 Gbit, 32 x 40 Gbit, 128 x 25 Gbit, 128 x 10 Gbit). We need this feature for the next two solutions – IMSI filtering and user plane monitoring.

IMSI filtering

In this application, first the user plane traffic is load balanced by EXA32100 and then the control plane is broadcasted to all units. Then the EXA24160 does the correlation and the IMSI filtering. The output is control and user plane for the relevant (filtered) traffic.  

Business benefits of Cubro Solutions:

• ​Guaranteed 100 % output of the Packetmaster
• Increased return on investment because the Packet Switch (PS) Probe is most powerful and cost-effective compared to any other probe in the market
• Cost-effective and highly scalable solution