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Bridgewater Systems has announced that it has set high performance benchmarks for the mobile control plane for 3G and 4G networks as part of the mobile packet core testing conducted by the European Advanced Network Test Center (EANTC). For more details, read Heavy Reading's new whitepaper "Control Plane Scalability and Performance Requirements for 3G and LTE Networks."

News

• The 3G and 4G mobile packet core tests validated the high performance and scalability of Bridgewater's control plane solution - the Bridgewater Home Subscriber Server (HSS) and Policy Controller (PCRF)  - and the Cisco ASR 5000 under conditions which are representative of a large, data-centric Tier 1 service provider network with one million active subscribers and high mobile data transaction rates. 
• For the 3G network, the Bridgewater PCRF supported the test of Cisco's GGSN. The test simulated one million users accessing the network at the same time at a sustained rate of 18,000 packet data protocol (PDP) activations per second. This equates to one million users activating data sessions in less than a minute.
• For the 4G LTE network, the Bridgewater HSS supported the test of Cisco's mobility management entity (MME) and the Bridgewater PCRF supported the test of the Cisco packet data network (PDN) gateway. The test simulated one million LTE devices coming onto the network within a short time. Once the devices were authenticated by the HSS, the PDN gateway requested attachment policies from the PCRF to activate both a dedicated bearer for a real-time VoIP or video data session as well as a default bearer for data services. The Bridgewater HSS and PCRF successfully supported sustained rates of 5,000 attachments per second.
• The 3G and 4G test scenarios were undertaken on the same Bridgewater PCRF hardware and software platform, demonstrating support for the evolution from 3G to 4G including full compliance with 3GPP Release 7 and 8 standards.
• Bridgewater, a Cisco Preferred Solution Developer, was the sole third party PCRF solution provider supporting the EANTC test of Cisco's mobile packet core. The Bridgewater HSS and PCRF are now available on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) platform.

Quotes

Carsten Rossenhövel, Managing Director, EANTC AG

"The EANTC tests are the first publicly available, comprehensive performance tests of Cisco's mobile packet core supported by Bridgewater's control plane solutions, carried out by an independent testing organization. A high performance control plane is critical in meeting future operator requirements for mobile data networks."

Gabriel Brown, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading

"Smartphone use cases, end-user applications, and the way devices interact with the network, are evolving rapidly. This makes the control-plane performance of mobile packet core equipment critical to operators as they manage this transition and design their networks to meet future requirements." 

David Sharpley, Senior Vice President, Bridgewater Systems

"In collaboration with Cisco, Bridgewater has set the industry performance benchmark for the 3G and 4G control plane. These independently validated results for the Bridgewater Home Subscriber Server and Policy Controller reflect our continued commitment to exceeding the carrier-grade performance and scalability requirements of our customers as they deploy next generation mobile networks."