Posts Tagged ‘3GPP’

Radical Simplicity: Moving Mountains for Personalized Services

Monday, January 16th, 2012 by Cam Cullen

Steve Jobs once said, “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

There are three pillars to Intelligent Policy Enforcement: Awareness, Analysis, and Control. Solutions that lack any of these capabilities will limit the ability of an operator to deliver personalized services to their customers. The more they lack, the more limitations that will be imposed on the operator – whether those limits are scalability, performance, granularity, or even operational in nature.

Let’s be upfront about something: Personalized services are HARD.

Think of all the pieces that have to fall into place to deliver a personalized service.

1) A subscriber activates their device, and attempts to access the network. The network authenticates the subscriber and/or device to ensure that they are allowed access to the network.

2) Subscriber “service” must be determined and provisioned to the network. The service “attributes” may include bandwidth allowed, volume of data (either bulk or per service), priorities, security filters, value-added services, or even multi-device correlations. Depending on how the network is configured, this provisioning could be a single transaction to a single system, or many transactions to many systems (policy, charging, access, etc.). The subscriber and their data traffic must be associated with whatever “attributes” that are necessary to deliver their purchased service to their devices.

3) The systems that have been provisioned with the service “attributes” must enforce those attributes without causing instability of the systems or requiring additional CAPEX due to “unexpected” scalability issues.

4) The systems must perform network and business intelligence gathering on all traffic to feed the analytics systems for future service development. The more information that can be collected, the more valuable the data is for the operator. This data has to be collected with as small of an interval as possible, as the longer the interval the more you lose granularity (for example spikes in bandwidth and latency can be smoothed out over long intervals)

5) If volume/event-based charging or CDR/UDR generation is required, every charging event can result in a transaction with the charging infrastructure, and especially at session closing time.

6) In a network where phones go into an “idle” mode or where subscriber movement between locations is tracked, every time this happens can result in more transactions.

And the more services you offer, the harder it gets…

With the announcement of our PL20000 today, we believe that we have delivered the final piece of the puzzle for an ecosystem that will enable the largest network operators in the world to compete on an even keel with smaller, more agile network operators. The limitations faced by large operators are focused on scalability and complexity. Scalability is now a moot point, as the PL20000 can meet the needs of even the most stressful network deployments with the massive performance increase and the port density/support for 100GE interfaces.

The “Simplicity” part is harder (hence the title of the blog). We have been adding capabilities for the last few years to make service creation simpler for operators. Report Studio is a perfect example of this – operators can now ask questions of the network staff and the network team can use Report Studio to answer them based on the massive statistics repository available in the PacketLogic Intelligence Center (which handles an order of magnitude more statistics than other solutions). Our Virtual Services Capability enables operators to define their own services based on application properties (URLs, http referrers, content-type, device-types, file-type, etc.) without intervention by Procera or our signature development team. We have unmatched capability with our PacketLogic Subscriber Management system – in terms of performance (over 100,000 transactions per second), capacity (up to 20,000,000 subscribers in a single system), and ease-of-use (customizable service dictionaries, easy to use interface, interfaces to multiple policy and charging systems simultaneously).

We believe that we are driving solutions towards the nirvana of ‘Radical Simplicity” where carrier-grade IPE solutions do not have to be managed by acolytes of technology that speak arcane languages (ok, maybe program arcane languages). The combination of performance, scalability, and ease-of-use will take Intelligent Policy Enforcement to mass-market deployments for operators of all sizes. Operators that are forced to wait 9 months for a service launch to capitalize on a new trend will find that the trend is no longer hot. Operators that must plan for a performance or scalability reduction for every new service that they launch will very quickly find their solutions very capital intensive and inefficient.

Simplicity is hard. We want to help you move mountains, so we are working smarter (as well as harder!).

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A World In Motion

Monday, February 14th, 2011 by Jon Linden

Did you notice the change? I know it’s subtle. But yes, you’re right, the Procera tagline changed to “Policy Enforcement In Motion”. Why? Well, there are a lot of good reasons. Let me try and explain.

Change is good. Everyone in this industry must embrace change, or get out. I’ve been with Procera for ten years now (wow, that made me sound like a dinosaur), but it feels like I’ve been at several different companies in many different industries. That’s how much things have changed over these ten years. Still, I would argue that we’ve stuck to our path, which has rendered us the technology leadership position in our segment.

So, what is our segment? That’s the key question, and we must continuously ensure that our messaging and technology is contemporary and up to date. The first question I got at a panel discussion in London this Fall was “what is the biggest change in DPI over the last five years?” My answer was that “DPI has evolved from being an autonomous product resolving a particular issue, mainly rampaging P2P traffic volumes, to becoming fully integrated into policy management.”

This integration is not just in network diagrams. It’s also integration into a complete ecosystem – the Policy and Charging Control (PCC) ecosystem. We’ve been evangelizing tiered services for years now, but it wasn’t until mobile operators started seeing large traffic volumes and serious revenue contribution from data services that this took off. And with these new demands came new requirements, and suddenly we had policy control, policy enforcement, online charging and more.

In this context, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is not a fair and complete description of what we do. We’re certainly not shying away from the fact that DPI is the core technology that gives us, and our fellow competitors, our competitive edge by associating type of traffic with subscriber, service plan, location and device. But ‘everyone’ claims to have DPI today, which is why policy enforcement is a much better description of what we actually do. And to make us justice in comparison with dumber equipment that enforces policies – like GGSNs – it’s fair to say Intelligent Policy Enforcement. Voilá, there you go, another three-letter acronym: IPE!

The applications enabled by the solution IPE are the same as before. The value proposition is around business intelligence, network optimization, network protection and tiered services. But as a component in the PCC ecosystem we can do more, and we can do it better. We can make our visions become reality and have a serious impact on bottom-line for service providers who are evolving, who innovate, and who are wiling to try new things to provide a better and sexier service to their customers. A necessity in today’s highly competitive hyper-connected society where everyone must check emails and Facebook at least every two minutes to ensure that they have not missed something important.

We, just like our customers, evolve – or move ahead. But in motion is also a word game to point out that the mobile operators drive these new requirements. We are the incumbent IPE vendor to some of the most prevailing mobile operators in the world. We’ve learnt, through real-life experience, how these operators function and what they need.

So, now you know why we do intelligent policy enforcement (IPE) based on advanced deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, to mobile operators that constantly evolve to accommodate customers in motion in a hyper-connected world that keeps spinning. Or in other words, why we do Policy Enforcement In Motion. I’m off. Back to the MWC show floor again – a place where there’s certainly a lot of motion!

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Does LTE ♥ DPI?

Monday, February 8th, 2010 by Cam Cullen

There is a lot of talk in the industry about DPI and mobile operators. There was an article on Light Reading in 2008 titled “DPI (hearts) LTE” that explored this topic. The general belief is that mobile operators MUST have DPI in their network to survive and compete, due to a number of bandwidth and usage challenges. Operators are bracing for users that will treat their mobile connection in the same way that they use their fixed broadband networks today (i.e. streaming video, file downloads, peer-to-peer, etc). Since laptops are expected to be one of the earliest LTE devices supported in many of the early LTE deployments, the data requirements of LTE must be addressed from the initial deployment.

The debate has been stoked by the inclusion of a loose requirement in the SAE-GW for Deep Packet Inspection, aimed at application classification and QoS at Layer 7 (not traditional router-style Layer 4 filters). Many traditional GGSN/PDSN gateway vendors have begun to message that DPI is a part of their LTE solutions, and the expectations of mobile operators are rising daily. RFPs are coming at a rapid pace from mobile operators, and every one includes a request for information on how DPI can be deployed in an LTE network.

At Procera, our experiences working with mobile operators have convinced us that DPI will be a key technology for LTE deployments. Mobile operators need network intelligence on what is happening on their network, and the ability of DPI to reach back into the access network and correlate individual subscribers to their location in the Radio Access Network and manage congestion is a vital requirement to ensure a good Quality of Experience for operators. Tight integration with the BSS and OSS backoffice systems ensures that the DPI systems provide a single point of contact for network visualization that includes subscriber, device, location, service plan, and application knowledge. This information can also be used for billing, allowing service providers to create flexible billing packages based on location, time of day, on-net or off-net application, roaming, or usage volume.

That is all well and good, but how does it relate to LTE? These requirements are also valid for 3G deployments, and are even deployed on some 2G networks today. The challenge for LTE and DPI pushes the boundaries of the DPI that is deployed on networks today because the scalability, performance, and service expectations will exponentially increase with LTE deployments over 3G. 10G links are a minimum performance requirement, and the bandwidth and session count per user will skyrocket as mobile devices become more capable of multi-tasking and cloud-based applications take hold. It will not be acceptable to do “a little” DPI, as all traffic will be required to receive DPI treatment. LTE networks will be service and application oriented, as operators will push new applications as a way to justify the higher rates for LTE services, and DPI will be required to recognize and prioritize real-time services.

Many providers of Mobile Gateway solutions will also claim this functionality, and try to convince operators that their integrated DPI solution is “good enough” to provide equivalent functionality for a LTE deployment. But there are some issues with integrated solutions that should cause operators to pause before deploying an integrated solution. The first is that an integrated solution ties you to a single vendor for your deployment, and ties your upgrade in capabilities to what your integrated solution can be upgraded to. Standalone solutions provide more flexibility, and give you more leverage as best-in-breed solutions increase in performance and capabilities. Integrated solutions also tend to suffer from performance and scalability decreases when additional functions are activated in the systems, of which DPI has traditionally been one of the most processor intensive applications on a CPU module. The “single chassis” argument that is commonly made by integrated vendors is also often an invalid one, as the performance and scalability requirements of a full DPI deployment often exceed the capabilities of an integrated chassis. Although LTE deployments will start small, requiring additional chassis systems just to activate DPI functionality will negate any advantage of an integrated solution.

The story of LTE and DPI is just starting to be written, but we are sure that the two will be tightly intertwined together going forward.

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DPI + Policy Control = True

Monday, January 11th, 2010 by Jon Linden

The rumor is true, DPI and Policy Control are confirmed to be a couple and have been seen hand-in-hand even in public recently. Feelings are mutual and this is bound to last “until death do us part”.

The 3GPP framework rules! At least in the mobile space and it’s also making headway into fixed. That’s good. DPI has become a critical component in a service provider network, which requires DPI to interact with surrounding systems. On top of this complexity grows with tiered services, volume quotas, sponsored sites, and premium gaming and telecommuter services.

This is where the policy server, or PCRF (Policy Charging and Rules Function), comes in.  DPI is an excellent traffic analyzer and policy enforcer. But since DPI in most cases resides inline and manages large volumes of traffic, it can’t afford  “wasting” cycles on polling information from other systems and correlating a lot of conditions.

This is a perfect assignment for the out-of-band PCRF server. PCRF is a decision point – PDP (Policy Decision Point). Once the decision is made it’s sent out to one or more PEPs (Policy Enforcement Point). DPI is a great PEP, but other equipment in the network might occasionally be better suited to host certain policies. The Gx interface in 3GPP enables standardized integration between DPI and PCRF. But the fact is that most installations still use a SOAP interface and a more or less proprietary API, but Gx is starting to make an entrance.

Since DPI and PCRF is part of the same eco system, resolving the same challenges, it’s quite understandable that there is some confusion as to whether or not DPI competes with PCRF vendors like Camiant, Openet, Bridgewater and Volubill. That’s certainly not the case. It’s rather the opposite where everyone’s working with everyone. I dare say it’s flat out promiscuous. Do I also dare to assume there will be consolidation within and between the two segments? Well, let me put it this way: anything else would surprise me.

We, Procera, see that most of our customers and prospects either made a decision or are making a decision on PCRF as they deploy DPI today. This is great. It opens up even more opportunities and options for how to create new services, how to strengthen the operators’ business case, and how to adjust to accommodate the ever-changing reality.

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