ipoque, a Rohde & Schwarz company providing market-leading deep packet inspection (DPI) software, announced new R&S PACE 2 capabilities for the virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC) market.
The high-performance DPI product offers vEPC vendors comprehensive signatures for video streaming, breakthrough efficiency, enhanced NAT and tethering detection and flexible licensing. Today, three of the five leading vEPC vendors have embedded R&S PACE 2 in their solutions to boost competitive advantage with Communication Service Providers (CSPs), claims ipoque.
CSPs are increasingly moving to software-defined networks and network function virtualization (SDN, NFV, respectively) in order to handle rapidly growing and diverse traffic. As a result, the vEPC market, which is key to SDN and NFV deployments, is projected to reach $15.9 billion by 2026, a CAGR of over 36.3 percent from 2018. CSPs need application-aware vEPC frameworks to optimize their SDN and NFV service deployments. vEPC provides the granular network intelligence CSPs use to develop application-based business models, service function chaining and advanced firewall rules.
vEPC solutions, in turn, rely on DPI to classify mobile apps and services and provide intelligence on subscriber traffic, app usage and behavioral patterns. R&S®PACE 2 provides extremely cost-effective and reliable detection and classification of thousands of applications and their attributes in real-time, making it ideal for vEPC vendors.
R&S®PACE 2 capabilities for the vEPC market include:
Extensive video streaming app signatures
By integrating R&S PACE 2 with their vEPC solutions, vendors can easily identify the approximately 80 percent of mobile traffic that consists of video streaming. This enables them to implement dedicated treatment of this important OpEx driver, including TCP optimization, steering or local breakout, and to improve customer Quality of Experience (QoE).
Extensive signatures for policy-bypass applications
WithR&S PACE 2 integrated into the firewall, vEPC vendors can detect potential policy bypasses and zero-rating fraud. Anomaly detection and heuristic analysis also enable them to block this kind of traffic. Extensive coverage of VPN and anonymizer signatures allows to prevent policy-bypassing.
Market-leading DPI efficiency and scalability
vEPC vendors benefit from the industry’s most efficient memory and CPU utilization: R&S PACE 2 features the smallest processing footprint—around 400 bytes/flow and zero memory utilization during run time. Capacity can be increased through targeted scaling as R&S PACE 2 has no external dependencies and works on all standard servers and operating systems, as well as physical, virtual and SDN architectures.
Improved NAT & Tethering Detection
R&S®PACE 2 uses advanced heuristics to detect NAT & tethering scenarios regardless of used transport encryption enabling vEPC vendors to realize use cases such as Tethering Abuse Detection and new revenue streams such as tethering-related data plan options.
- Custom Signatures
vEPC vendors can add or implement their own signatures as needed, for instance, to comply with strict service level agreements.
For more information, download the white paper “DPI for vEPC vendors: Real-time analytics, QoE and security,” and listen to the archived webinar “DPI: The key technology for vEPC solutions – Build or Buy?”
Dirk Czepluch, CEO, Ipoque
R&S PACE 2 ensures vEPC vendors can reliably and accurately track and classify the latest apps and protocols. By making it easy to embed the industry’s best-performing DPI software in their solutions, we’re freeing vEPC providers to focus on their core competencies and gain competitive advantage with CSPs.
