Solutions for Communication Service Providers (CSPs)
Network Visibility Solutions for CSPs
Build a future-proof, agile network
Today CSPs have more challenges than ever with legal compliance, regulatory requirements, security and technical challenges related to new technologies, such as 5G, while the technical savvy digitally native users also increase demands on the network and business. In order to be able to survive in the tougher competitive landscape, retain customers, provide quality service assurance and customer satisfaction and ultimately ensure profitability, the CSPs need to be able to have visibility of the network.
CSPs need to know the network health and load at any time and react immediately as needed, follow changes in usage patterns, such as new services or applications’ impact on network load, and plan network resources respectively. CSPs also have to understand subscriber behavior, and locate network hot-spots providing good service for subscribers.
Network visibility for modern networks
Cubro’s products provide network visibility solutions to deliver network traffic to network tools, including Service Assurance, Security, and Analytics systems, for all of the Service Provider network technologies deployed and include a road map to network visibility of 5G SA core networks.
5G Network Visibility
5GC’s cloud native Service Based Interface (SBI) uses HTTP2 for Cloud Native Function (CNF) communication. In addition, messages are encrypted using either TLS1.2 or TLS.3 making it extremely difficult to decipher the messages outside of the SBI message bus. Therefore, network vendors have created methods for extracting SBI data in clear text. If the 5GC is multi-vendor with CNFs from several vendors it is challenging to generate data extracts when those vendors each use different formats and methods.
Vendor agnostic solution
Cubro is working with market leading network vendors to develop solutions to collect SBI data, to filter, aggregate and manipulate data as necessary, and to forward it to the network and security monitoring systems. In addition to collaborating with the network vendors, Cubro is also independently developing a vendor agnostic solution for obtaining the data from the SBI bus and distributing it to multi vendor monitoring systems.
Data enrichment Solution
In addition, many monitoring and probing systems need to receive 5G SA user plane network traffic as well as control plane traffic. Cubro’s products provide the N3 and N4 interfaces needed for the 5G user plane monitoring, but the correlation of control and user plane data requires a lot of resources in the probing systems. To make this process easier and less resource intensive, Cubro provides an option of data enrichment in the user plane packets including location information, user IP address and other fields that eliminate the need for N4 connections, to help the probing system to correlate the user and control plane data easily.
