ENGINEERING

Napatech has announced new tunneling protocol support that provides increased visibility for monitoring and management of mobile networks. With mobile networks now supporting a varied and growing mix of applications, efficient monitoring and management of mobile networks is now imperative.

The new tunneling protocol support will perform flow identification and intelligent distribution based on the contents of tunnels rather than on the tunnel itself. Mobile subscriber traffic is transported in tunnels, such as GTP, through the core network. It is therefore important to monitor and analyze the contents of tunnels and base management decisions on this information.

“Our equipment vendor customers need to analyze all data on the mobile network to build a picture of what is happening”, stated Erik Norup, President and CMO, Napatech. “To do this effectively at high speed, the data to be analyzed needs to be distributed amongst the available processing resources in the standard server. Distributing based on tunnel information is not enough, as there is a huge mix of different applications with different quality of service requirements transported in tunnels. Distribution needs to be based on the contents of tunnels. Now we can offer this capability. ”

Napatech will provide support for GPLS Tunneling Protocol (GTP) and IP-in-IP tunneling for both IPv4 and IPv6 networks.

“IP-in-IP will become increasingly important as we make the transition from IPv4 to IPv6”, continued Norup. “As the number of IPv4 addresses available continues to decline, there will be a growing need to use IPv6, but existing IPv4 addresses will still remain. There is therefore a need to transport IPv4 over IPv6 and vice versa. There will even be a need for IPv4 tunneling via IPv4 networks where only a limited number of IPv4 addresses are available. With our tunneling support we can ensure that the same picture is provided no matter the type of network you are using.”

As tunneling in mobile networks often results in IP fragmentation, existing Napatech features for identification and distribution of IP fragments will also be important.

“The combination of tunneling and IP fragment handling support provides a powerful feature set for telecom equipment vendors who need to build mobile network monitoring and management products”, added Norup. “With these features, we off-load and accelerate the task of handling tunnels allowing our customers to focus on analysis using the majority of the processing resources available in powerful standard servers.”

The tunneling support features will be available in April 2013.

For more information contact Napatech at www.napatech.com