Network probing is a critical process in telecommunications that enables effective monitoring and assessment of network health while also providing valuable business intelligence. This method involves tapping into network traffic in real-time to collect essential data on network performance, functionality, and status, or utilizing API calls to various network elements to gather relevant analytics. Together, the probe and the analytics platform can produce aggregated data across multiple dimensions, such as subscriber segments, access technologies (fixed, wireless, mobile), device types (IoT, mobile), and service usage types (data, video streaming, voice, and messaging). This data can also be shared with other business intelligence platforms, allowing for the creation of business value based on these insights.
Probing Applications and Use Cases
Probing is essential for ensuring network health, improving performance, and supporting business decisions based on credible data. Some of its key applications include:
- Monitoring Network Performance:
- Measures critical KPIs such as registration, service access, latency, packet loss, and throughput.
- Ensures that services like internet access, VoIP, gaming, and video streaming align with user expectations and SLAs.
- Identifying and Resolving Issues:
- Detects network and subscriber problems, enabling engineers to address them promptly.
- Empowers support and operations personnel to troubleshoot and root case technical issues without requiring to reproduce the problem thus avoiding further impacting the end customer
- Reduces downtime and enhances customer satisfaction by resolving issues quickly.
- Congestion Management:
- Reports on bandwidth allocation to manage network congestion effectively, improving overall efficiency.
- Forecasting and Planning:
- Analyzes probe data to predict usage trends.
- Supports timely forecasting of network growth and necessary upgrades.
- Ensuring Security and Compliance:
- Plays a vital role in meeting regulatory standards and documenting security measures.
- Identifies vulnerabilities and suspicious activities to address usage fraud and improve security.
- Driving Business Insights:
- Provides data for developing new products, performing market analysis, and predicting churn.
Network Probing Deployment Architecture and Challenges
Current probe deployments monitor various interfaces, protocols and high data volumes from multiple points in a network, which requires a significant compute footprint spread across different physical locations. We believe the best architectures rely on both physical and virtualization-based deployments, including Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on VM-based clouds or Containerized Network Functions (CNFs). The latter are becoming increasingly popular with technically advanced CSPs as they aim to achieve the same elasticity and flexibility that has become the norm in cloud-based IT applications.
Probes are often deployed at various geographical locations, where they collect and forward the necessary metadata to a central processing node. Understanding the interdependencies among network nodes can complicate data extraction and interpretation. The central probe plays a critical role, as it must correlate both control and user plane information to generate comprehensive logs. These logs are then forwarded to the analytics engine for further processing and presentation on the user interface. Additionally, edge probes may need to obtain aggregated information from the central probe through API calls.
Some guidance on KPIs and reports to be generated is available from standards organizations like 3GPP and GSMA. Those focus on areas such as network availability, performance, quality of service, customer experience, capacity, and utilization. , These often include various dimensions like access technology, network nodes, customer segments, roaming status, and partnerships, as well as different time granularities. Additionally, some KPIs must be tailored or added to meet specific customer requirements and use cases. Understanding and generating the right KPIs and reports is essential for effective network operations.
Additionally, networks are becoming increasingly more distributed. Operators need infrastructure with edge computing and cloud capabilities to support IoT and 5G technologies which bring a multitude of use cases to serve diverse industries and verticals. Network intelligence is increasingly required closer to the point where the data is generated or where it will be consumed, e.g., at an enterprise location. This presents additional architectural and deployment challenges to distribute and automate probe solutions to match this flexible network distribution.
Probe vendors face several key challenges in modern networks, which feature diverse topologies and dynamic network protocols that are constantly evolving. Probes must adapt to those changes and accommodate the different network elements introduced for each access technology. Additionally, traffic encryption poses a significant barrier to visibility, complicating effective probing. For instance, the 5G core architecture includes Service-Based Architecture (SBA) and Service-Based Interfaces (SBI), where control plane communications via SBI are encrypted. Similarly, roaming network traffic between Service Endpoint Protection Proxies (SEPP) is also encrypted. Probes must find ways to navigate these encryption-rich scenarios to extract the necessary information. Furthermore, compliance with regulations like GDPR raises privacy concerns, requiring the masking of personally identifiable information (PII) and controlling data exports to safeguard user privacy.
Technologies like Software-Defined Networking (SDN) require the development of new probing techniques. Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) benefit from automated lifecycle management procedures, allowing them to be instantiated and scaled in or out to optimize network resource utilization. These CNFs operate in a purely elastic environment, decoupled from the underlying physical or virtual hardware. As a result, traditional probing methods that rely on static physical locations are inadequate, as they cannot capture traffic within the Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVi) layer or the hardware infrastructure gateway. To address this challenge, containerized network functions need built-in probe agents for efficient traffic monitoring, or integrated software-based tapping agents might be utilized to replicate and stream the data towards the probes.
Network probing remains vital for maintaining network visibility and performance. While there are technical challenges; understanding and addressing these complexities can help effectively monitor and optimize networks and user experience. Additionally, the right probing technology can deliver business value beyond the original technical use cases enabling new revenue models based on data monetization and API-based network exposure solutions. As technology continues to evolve, staying ahead of emerging trends and challenges will be crucial for telecom operators and Probe vendors to ensure reliable and secure network operations.
Let Us Know What You Thought about this Post.
Put your Comment Below.