3G/4G Voice Quality Gigamon

Maintaining 3G and 4G/LTE Quality of Service
// White Paper
The Smart Route To Visibility™
Monitoring and Maintaining the Quality of Service during the The move towards LTE
Evolution of Network infrastructure Global, national and regional Service Providers are deploying
The world is changing quickly, and never more so than in the High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) services and basing the
domain of communications. With the demarcation between delivery upon 3G and 4G infrastructure. As 3G is now clearly
social and business communications all but gone, the established and enjoying a phase of ‘mainstream’ leadership,
subscriber expectations continue to drive significant pressure the evolution in the radio and core network space continues
on infrastructure to deliver increasing scale, increasing reach, with Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Evolved Packet System
and increasing performance with improved quality. Certainly this (EPS) leading the way forward to the 4G revolution. The 3G
could be described as a ‘perfect storm’ but after every storm infrastructure of today was the first platform that provided the
clear-skies return. In this case the demands of scale, reach, “anytime, anywhere” access and entertainment medium and
performance and quality are the new baseline, the new ‘norm’ of over the medium term, the migration to 4G will deliver the reality
the global communications environment. of a full multi-media experience for the subscriber.
With the rise in employee mobility and the notable improvement The mobile, medium-definition and high-definition video era,
in applications and services that empower and enable the with “always on” expectations, will drive the next wave of
mobile worker, the expectations for “anytime, anywhere” access evolution in the Service Provider network infrastructure (4G and
to communications will continue to accelerate. The ‘extended LTE) but in the meantime while the performance of the radio
enterprise’ (in other words, the services and infrastructure that migrates from 2G to 3G and then 4G, the core network also
extend beyond the four-walls of the enterprise itself) create has to revive itself with new architecture enhancements in order
increasing opportunity and potential for Service Providers to keep up with seemingly unrealistic data speeds, call quality
around the globe. Unfortunately at the same time the next expectations and overall expansion.
generation of subscriber is now in the workforce and their
allegiance to one Service Provider over another is established The 3G Network
or destroyed based upon the quality of the last call, the last The 3G packet core architecture is comprised of a variety of
interaction or the last provisioning/billing event. It is therefore inter-dependent components that in combination create the
critical that Service Provider infrastructure and services extend Universal Mobile Telecommunications System. The General
to serve the enterprise of the future, but do so while enhancing Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Support Nodes (GSN), the
and maintaining the service quality. Gateway GSN (GGSN) and the Serving GSN (SGSN) all establish
Copyright © 2012 Gigamon, LLC. All rights reserved. Gigamon, GigaVUE, GigaSMART, G-TAP, Flow Mapping are registered trademarks of Gigamon, LLC and/or affiliates in the
United States and certain other countries. Visibility Fabric, Traffic Visibility Fabric (TVF), Citrus, and The Smart Route To Visibility are trademarks of Gigamon. All other trademarks
are the property of their respective owners.
Gigamon® | 598 Gibraltar Drive Milpitas, CA 95035 | PH 408.263.2022 | www.gigamon.com
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// White Paper
an interface between the radio system and fixed networks for of the quality being impacted – in other words, enable a move
packet-switched services. The reliable, stable and scalable from reactive to proactive management.
performance of all of these is critical to ensure that service
stability and quality is maintained. A New Approach to Providing Pervasive Visibility
As the subscriber-driven bandwidth and service demands for
The SGSN (Serving GPRS Support Node) is a critical component Service Providers started to rise, at Gigamon we realized that
as it supports mobility management functions within the network a different approach was going to be required to ensure that
as it receives signaling and packet data from the access the management and monitoring of 2G, 3G, 4G and beyond
nodes. With many functions being handled by this architecture networks would both scale in capability but also enable a
(including forwarding, tunneling, authentication, signaling and transition of management from reactive to proactive. Following
mobility management) the stability and performance directly the approach of the past and deploying specific and very
impacts overall service quality and scale. localized management technologies to track packets and calls
as they pass a specific point within the environment was clearly
With all of these discrete systems and components of a solution of the past and instead providing an architecture that
infrastructure operating in combination to complete service offered pervasive visibility was required.
provisioning, call set up, call delivery, call termination and billing,
the life of the Service Provider Operations team has taken on
a significant degree of complexity. The migration from circuit-
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for more diverse and valuable services, but also created a new
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wave of complexity and challenge to operate, maintain and
sustain the infrastructure of today.
Sustaining Call Quality Visibility Fabric

In the world of circuit-switched, when call-setup was completed
the quality of the call was reasonably easy to assess, measure
and support. In the packet-switched world a new range Data Voice Video
of challenges arose that require a fundamentally different
Figure (1)
approach.
Gigamon released the GigaVUE® Traffic Visibility Fabric™
With the move to packet-switched transport, jitter, latency that establishes a service provider grade scalable framework,
and packet ‘QoS’ all directly, and potentially adversely, impact utilizing purpose built appliances to increase the efficiency of
the experience of the subscriber through reduced call quality, monitoring and security tools. It establishes a visualization layer
reliability and stability. To be able to understand, monitor and between the network and monitoring tools so that traffic on
measure these critical attributes of voice traffic on a packet- the production packet-switched network can be intelligently
backbone, pervasive visibility provides a powerful ally to enable replicated to the monitoring/management tool that can then
reach and insight into potentially harmful characteristics ahead insightfully use the information. The Traffic Visibility Fabric
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enables engineers to deploy monitoring appliances wherever logical groupings, so that traffic matching either very specific
and whenever they are required. Moves, adds and changes or very broad parameters is forwarded on to management
to the visibility configuration can be easily performed without and monitoring systems. In addition, traffic can be duplicated
requiring any physical configuration changes or creating if one specific stream of traffic is relevant to more than one
additional load on the production network. Figure 1 shows the management tool, or the traffic can be truncated if only a portion
basic concept of a visibility fabric. of the packet is relevant to the specific analysis underway. For
example, to understand “top talkers” across a network, only the
The fabric delivers pervasive visibility of the millions of flows, first 128 bytes of a packet are relevant and the remainder can
thousands of events and hundreds of changes that occur be discarded. In doing so, a reasonably low-bandwidth tool can
within the increasingly complex infrastructure in real time. monitor a high performance backbone or network segment.
Additionally, the visibility fabric can prioritize critical traffic flows
over nonessential ones, it can select one call over another, one The GigaSTACK software solution enables several discrete
application over another, and in doing so truly optimize the visibility nodes to be combined into a single “manage as one”
management and monitoring of information. fabric via an intuitive browser-based management UI. Armed
with the pervasive visibility made available by Gigamon’s Traffic
With the visibility fabric in place, monitoring and security Visibility Fabric, monitoring, management and compliance tools
tools that were limited by the number of connection points can enable service providers to reliably monitor and manage
or inundated with the volume of traffic, can now deliver their their 2G and 3G networks, and then use the pervasive visibility
full value by providing end-to-end cell-tower to core network to assist in the accurate design and engineering of the next
visibility. With this new found breadth of visibility, Service generation 4G and LTE networks.
Provider Operations and Management groups can create
a detailed analysis of performance impacting events, can Conclusion
transition from reactive to proactive and can use the reach of Gaining subscriber-level intelligence into the performance of the
the fabric to avoid the on-going operational cost, delay and network, understanding usage, performance and consumption
complexity of a truck-roll. If the fabric has the reach, Operational trends is key to improving the overall Quality of Experience of
personnel can dynamically select traffic flows from remote the end-user. Our Visibility Fabric will help overcome the final
locations and connect those flows to centralized tool and hurdle to meeting your goals – achieving network visibility – by
management systems to evaluate stability, quality or scale providing you with a proactive approach that does not strain
issues. your budget.
Visibility of calls establishes new opportunity to improve Enjoy the following benefits and peace of mind as you roll out
Subscriber Intelligence your visibility fabric:
Using the Gigamon Visibility Fabric, traffic streams flowing
across the 3G and 4G core networks can be tapped and/or • Extended visibility enables proactive identification of poor
mirrored into the Gigamon Visibility Fabric where the streams performance impacting high value accounts and identifying
are filtered and aggregated before being replicated into offending subscribers.
management tools including Performance Monitors, Service • Eliminate SPAN/mirror port contention allowing
Monitors or Network Monitors. Gigamon’s unique patented Flow you to easily replicate the appropriate data to
Mapping filters, intelligently segregates the data into different multiple tools at the same time in order to
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// White Paper
eliminate data blind spots.

• Quickly introduce new tools and monitor new
applications without having to wait for lengthy
change managementprocesses in order to
address dynamic business needs.
• Ability to prioritize traffic at the flow, packet or
application level, giving you the ability to send
the right information to the right tool for optimum
visibility and clarity.
• Predict when service is degrading, allowing your
team to fix the problem before users call about it.
• Provides traffic filtering capability to reduce the
amount of data being sent to a tool, which
allows you to reduce cost by using/re-using
tools to monitor multiple links.
About Gigamon
Gigamon® provides intelligent Traffic Visibility Networking
solutions for enterprises, data centers and service providers
around the globe. Our technology empowers infrastructure
architects, managers and operators with unmatched visibility
into the traffic traversing both physical and virtual networks
Gigamon Solution without affecting the performance or stability
of the production environment. Through patented technologies,
the Gigamon GigaVUE® portfolio of high availability and high
density products intelligently delivers the appropriate network
traffic to security, monitoring or management systems. With over
seven years’ experience designing and building intelligent traffic
visibility products in the US, Gigamon serves the vertical market
leaders of the Fortune 1000 and has an install base spanning 40
countries.
For more information about our Gigamon products visit:

www.gigamon.com
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3G/4G Voice Quality Gigamon

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Maintaining 3G and 4G/LTE Quality of Service

Sustaining Call Quality Visibility Fabric

issues. your budget.

eliminate data blind spots.

For more information about our Gigamon products visit:

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