Rohde & Schwarz enhances Niagara Networks’ new mobile visibility solution with subscriber-aware intelligence

Technical partnership between Rohde & Schwarz and Niagara Networks will address security, performance and specialized applications challenges in mobile networks

ipoque GmbH, a Rohde & Schwarz company and provider of industry-leading OEM deep packet inspection (DPI) software, announced a technology partnership with the Silicon Valley-based company Niagara Networks — a pioneer in providing an open visibility platform for mobile networks. By embedding a GTP subscriber resolving module from Rohde & Schwarz into their network packet broker offerings, Niagara Networks is able to bring mobile visibility with in-depth subscriber awareness into mobile networks. The subscriber-aware intelligence solution enables mobile operators to handle an enormous growth in subscriber data traffic and to establish and maintain high-quality user experience and security.

Mobile networks are complex environments in terms of interfaces, subscriber data and traffic throughput. The challenge in being fully and truly subscriber-aware lies in the ability to follow the subscriber’s data plane as the control and data plane identifiers are changing. Through the technical partnership with Rohde and Schwarz, Niagara Networks’ platform is able to analyze the control plane to associate and correlate subscriber-aware user plane traffic. “By partnering with Rohde & Schwarz, we are able to ensure that our solution will handle the complex call flow scenarios correctly, accurately and in a timely manner”, said Yoram Ehrlich, VP Products at Niagara Networks. “With Niagara Networks’ solution, mobile operator tools will get subscriber-aware traffic not 50% of the time or 80% of the time, but 100 % of the time – always”.

The prerequisite for mobile network traffic analysis for security and performance is visibility into subscriber-aware traffic flows. Without this visibility, the analysis results and outputs from security, performance, and monitoring tools will be incorrect. Moreover, as mobile operators are faced with an exponential growth in subscriber traffic, the ability to intelligently load balance traffic loads between tools or to target traffic to different tools using flexible criteria becomes paramount.

“We are pleased to work with Niagara Networks on their mobile visibility offering, harnessing our mobile network expertise in a way that enables operators to reduce costs and enhances their ability to address their growth challenges,” said Stephan Klokow, VP Engineering at ipoque, a Rohde & Schwarz company.

Mobile networks require a growing number of tools for monitoring, application and network performance. IDS/IPS, VoIP analyzers, data recorders, DLP, compliance monitors, and more – all these tools require actual packet data to perform their analysis. Supplying them is a considerable challenge, particularly in real time and without making compromises on performance or availability. Often, these tools are starved to keep the flow of data consistent. In addition, escalating bandwidth demands, a lack of access points to the tools, limited network visibility and higher bandwidths than are supported by the tools have added to the monitoring costs and pose challenges to visibility.

With the new subscriber-aware mobile visibility solution, mobile operators and service providers can actively transform the management and monitoring of their networks to stay ahead of continually growing amounts of traffic, new real-time services, and complex subscriber behaviors. Niagara Networks provides the ability to add new or additional analytics, performance management, and security tools addressing the challenges in integrating, scaling, or aggregating disparate traffic as required to achieve a holistic view of each subscriber’s daily services and device usage.

Niagara Network’s Open Visibility Platform serves as an open deployment hub to host multiple security and networking solutions virtually directly on the network packet broker appliance, enabling the use of network intelligence applications such as mobile visibility tools, application filtering, conditional and selective TLS decryption, data masking and any other advanced packet data inspection and manipulation tools.