Netepc whitepaper v3

Networks & Communications Group

NetEPC An integrated, scalable and cost effective LTE Evolved Packet Core

NetEPC – Evolved Packet Core To-Go There may still be much industry debate and hand wringing related to the ongoing evolution of the mobile broadband infrastructure but one thing of which we can be certain is that the ongoing rollouts will continue for some considerable time. It will be a long way off before we really see the exact form and function of all the 4G deployments as a variety of local (geography, density, spectrum, politics) factors shape infrastructure decisions.

Since the early days of mobile networks with evolving and competing technologies such as AMPS, GSM and CDMA, there have always been multiple paths. Even with many technical nuances and variations of 4G, plus a continuing dose of media hype to fuel the fire, one only needs to look at current deployments to see that LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks will be a major part of the global 4G infrastructure.

2012 has been a year that has seen increased LTE trials and commercial launches. As we entered the year, 49 LTE networks had been commercially launched across 29 countries. As recently as November 2nd the GSA (Global mobile Suppliers Association) released a new report stating that these numbers have increased to 113 operators who have launched commercial LTE networks in 51 countries. The overall investment in LTE, by operators alone, has risen by 45% in the last year and the GSA forecasts that a total of 209 networks will have been commercially launched in 75 countries by the end of 2013.

Greenland

Sweden Norway

Iceland

Canada

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Denmark

Lithuania

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Poland Germany Czech

United States of America Pacific Ocean

Bahamas Dominican Republic

Belize Jamaica Panama Ecuador

Puerto Rico Barbados

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Cyprus Lebanon Israel

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Bahrain Qatar UAE

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Japan

Pacific Ocean

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Nepal Bagladesh

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Laos Thailand

Vietnam Cambodia

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Guam Philippines

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Indian Ocean Mauritius

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Solomon Islands Papua New Guinea

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Republic Ukraine Slovakia Switzerland Austria Hungary Moldova Slovenia Croatia Romania

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LTE Commitments LTE Deployments

Figure 1: Map shows all global LTE deployments and commitments.

If you are a current user of a 4G smart phone you will already be enamored with the increased performance and flexibility offered by these new high speed networks. If you often travel outside the denser city areas you will also have experienced the frustration when your phone’s 4G-LTE signal indicator disappears and reverts back to mere 3G (or worse). Although some of the major LTE deployments now have coverage in all major cities (in the U.S. Verizon’s 4G LTE network map states availability “in 419 cities, covering nearly 75% of the U.S. population”) as soon as you pass the urban perimeter 4G is virtually nonexistent.

Expecting 4G high speed broadband in the middle of nowhere may be unreasonable but there are many sizeable rural communities that could benefit, although provider economics make it challenging to deploy the needed technology.

Smaller scale RANs (Radio Access Network) are not too difficult to architect as there are a number of options available for variously sized cells, antenna and eNodeB combinations. The core network required for LTE is more tricky to scale down cost effectively. The Evolved Packet Core or EPC is built around a number of complex network elements and gateways. With each element in charge of a key function and taking into account network redundancy, this typically involves a lot of large scale hardware platforms. In a major urban area where a network would support many hundreds of thousands of subscribers (some forecasts predict that some will soon be over 1 million), the investment in equipment is easily justified. As capacities decrease it’s not so easy, so how then can service providers take best advantage of the opportunity to deploy across the multitude of smaller rural communities? Polaris Networks, working with Advantech and Comtel has built an innovative, flexible and highly affordable solution.

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olaris Networks provides Core Network solutions for LTE technology that are field deployable, carrier-class gateways and test & measurement tools. Started in 2003 by former Agilent Technologies employees, Polaris Networks delivered test tools for wireless protocols and telecommunication standards including Wi-Fi, WiMax, RFID & ATCA. In the last five years, Polaris has primarily focused on developing solutions for LTE technology. The tools developed by Polaris are widely used by software vendors and manufacturers of LTE Base Stations and Core Network Equipment. Based on their significant experience working closely with standards bodies such as 3GPP and their in-depth first-hand knowledge of LTE Packet Core protocols, Polaris Networks has effectively combined all the key EPC components on a single platform to provide a small EPC solution for cost sensitive deployments in rural networks.

Evolved Packet Core

(EPC)

The all IP network is built out as the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). The EPC is constructed from three components; The Mobility Management Entity (MME), Serving Gateway (S-GW) and Packet Data Network Gateway (PDN-GW),. The division of labor and roles within the EPC are:

LTE NetEPC

MME • Authentication • Handover • Idle-mode Mobility &Paging • Bearer Management • Inter-working with 3GPP 2G and 3G Networks • Built-in HSS functionality

The team at Polaris Networks recognized the challenges of small scale deployment for LTE solutions and came up with their tightly integrated and highly functional solution known as the LTE NetEPC. As part of their portfolio know as Carrier Gateways the LTE NetEPC combines the Mobile Management Entity (MME), the Home Subscriber Server (HSS), the Serving Gateway (S-GW), the Packet Data Network Gateway (PDN-GW) and the Policy & Charging Rules Function (PCRF) into a single carrier-class, highly-available platform.

S-GW • Routes user plane packet between eNodeB and P-GW. • Local Mobility Anchor for inter-eNodeB handover and mobility between 3GPP networks

Ideally suited for use in small (Tier II/Tier III, Rural) public and private networks, such as Public Safety Networks, the NetEPC uses a scalable and cost-effective architecture. Network operators are able to deploy 4G LTE services in a manner that reduces signaling overhead, distributes the session management load, simplifies network management and delivers an excellent Quality of Experience (QoE) to the user.

Features and capabilities of the LTE NetEPC include:

PDN-GW • Interface between LTE network and other packet networks • Enforces QoS and Charging Rules based on configured Policy • Anchor Point for Network Mobility The Polaris NetEPC solution also includes the functionality of the HSS (Home Subscriber Server) and PCRF (Policy and Charging Rules Function).

Responsibilities of these elements include:

• All components of EPC, viz., MME, SGW, PGW • HSS and PCRF functions • The control plane and user plane capabilities required to build a fully functional LTE network • Support for all signalling procedures, such as UE Attach, Detach, Default and Dedicated Bearer Establishment, Modification and Termination, Paging and Service Requests, Handovers, Roaming, Multiple PDN Connectivity, Trace, etc.

• Dual IPv4/IPv6 support for transport of user-plane traffic • Conformity to the 3GPP Release 9.0 specifications and clearly defined roadmap for later 3GPP releases

• • • • •

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User identification and addressing network-terminal authentication Default Access Point Name (APN) Default Bearer QoS Class Indicator (QCI) Service Flows that result in the establishment of Dedicated Bearers are configured by the PCRF, or in the form of Static PCC

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The core design is based on a distributed architecture that allows multiple configuration options based on scalability, performance and redundancy requirements. Platform scalability reduces signalling overhead, distributes session management and simplifies network management. Performance is always crucial and the LTE NetEPC can accommodate high transaction rates for signalling procedures and can maintain high performance levels to match all key User Plane metrics related to throughput and latency.

Capacity and compatibility have also been well considered as Polaris Networks have fully tested the solution with various traffic models and LTE base stations from various vendors proving the capability to scale up to a significant number of simultaneous subscribers.

with a clear customer centric approach Advantech provides business critical hardware to the world’s leading networking equipment providers and telecom equipment manufacturers.

No matter the size of the network, any LTE EPC installation needs to meet critical performance, reliability and carrier grade specific requirements.

Polaris Networks’ expertise is in networking software so they looked to the ATCA hardware ecosystem to find a supplier with the necessary processing, platform and product experience to help them create a complete system solution. With nearly 30 years of embedded computing and communications experience and as a long-standing user of Polaris’s ATCA test suites, Advantech was an evident choice. Always innovative

The Advantech NCG team understands the requirements and challenges of product development teams within the networking and communications industry and were able to offer a number of solutions to Polaris Networks. Utilizing the flexibility and performance attributes of AdvancedTCA as the foundation for the solution, two of Advantech’s high performance processing blades stood out as ideal options to power Polaris’s high-end LTE NetEPC solution.

Advantech Networks and Communications Group Since their inception back in 1983, Advantech has become the world’s largest embedded manufacturer with a turnover of nearly $1 Billion. The Networks & Communications Group (NCG) began developing specific products for this growing market segment in 1999 and now serves many of the world’s leading networking OEMs with a broad range of standard and custom, blades, appliance platforms and fully integrated systems.

Figure 2: LTE EPC Network Architecture

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Advantech Dual Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 Series Processor ATCA Blades

base model, support for dual-dual star fabric implementations can be added by installing an FMM5001, the first of Advantech’s FMM designs. The FMM type II socket with PCIe x16 connectivity provides extension possibilities for additional front port I/O, offload and acceleration controllers such as Intel® QuickAssist accelerators, IPSec offload engines or customer specific logic. This unmatched flexibility combined with the highest performance Intel® Xeons available make the MIC-5332 equally well suited for application and data plane workloads.

Advantech is now on its fifth generation of high performance ATCA blades and as a Premier member of the Intel® Intelligent Systems Alliance, has the earliest access to pre-release silicon. This brings many benefits to Advantech’s customers. For example they can stay ahead of the development curve with new revisions of Advantech blades and appliance platforms released in sync with Intel’s formal market release of new processors. A good example of this is with Advantech’s two Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 based blades that were released in near unison to Intel’s formal announcements.

The MIC-5332 supports hot-swappable RTMs such as the RTM-5101 for High Availability (HA) needs, rear I/O and dual SAS storage with RAID as well as an optional

MIC-5332

FMM type II socket for further I/O and offload as shown in Figure 1. The MIC-5332 and RTM combination make it an ideal fit for the NetEPC solution. There is sufficient processing power to handle a significant number of subscribers per blade. For deployments which need to cater for more subscribers the solution can scale by adding more blades to a system with a higher slot count.

In the future, feature enhancements and the use of virtual machines for specific EPC functions could allow for single blade solutions to be deployed in areas where initial subscriber coverage is low and grow with the subscriber base, again by adding blades when necessary.

Advantech’s MIC-5332 is a dual processor ATCA blade based on the Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 Processor. It enables the highest processing performance available in an ATCA form factor with up to 16 cores and 32 threads of processing power, fast PCI Express gen. 3 lanes running at up to 8Gbps and best in class virtualization support.

Two QPI interfaces between the CPUs improve memory and I/O access throughput and latencies when one processor needs to access resources hosted by the other socket. With four DDR3 DIMMs per socket in a quad channel design running up to 1600MT/s, the MIC-5332 not only offers superior memory bandwidth over 3-channel designs, but can also support memory densities up 256GB using latest LR DIMM technology.

While supporting two 10GBaseKX4 interfaces in the

The front panel FMM provides upgradeable connections to the external carrier Ethernet network. The blade’s onboard flash allows the operating system to boot up from local resources and the IPMI implementation facilitates the implementation of remote management 5

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and upgrade services. In addition, the RTMs redundant storage feature provides a cost-effective and reliable subscriber database option using robust 2.5” SSDs.

options which can be applied to meet future needs without fork lifting out the main processing platform.

Advantech has numerous ecosystem partners with vendors that can supply the gamut of technologies and capabilities, from silicon to software and firmware to chassis. Comtel Electronics, one of Advantech’s chassis ecosystem partners, helped to provide Polaris with a robust chassis where Advantech’s ATCA blades and Polaris Networks NetEPC software could come together to make a complete system.

MIC-5333 MIC-5333 ATCA blade is designed around a similar dual Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 architecture as the 5332 and shares all the same intrinsic benefits.

There is enhanced flexibility for today’s product line and for future network needs with support for up to four 40G fabric ports.

One very significant addition is a completely new Co-Processor/PCH. The Intel® Communications Chipset 89xx Series, formerly known as Cave Creek, contains hardware engines for encryption, pattern matching, and compression. It also has four GbE ports, 16 PCIe Gen2 lanes for connecting the processor to the accelerators and GbE ports, four lanes of PCIe Gen1, and various system peripherals connectable via DMI. Intel® QuickAssist Technology is a key feature of the new chipset and provides an array of notable security features which include encryption/decryption using AES, DES, 3DES or (A)RC4 algorithms, hashing using , SHA-1/2, MD5 or HMAC algorithms, deflate and LZS high-speed data compression.

Since 1993, Comtel Electronics GmbH has been offering Backplanes and integrated systems based on a wide range of technologies including VME, CompactPCI, AdvancedTCA, and custom proprietary solutions. Comtel has expertise in a wide range of engineering disciplines including concept design, board assembly and testing, mechanical design and production, wiring and functional test, system engineering and software design. Along with their broad range of AdvancedTCA chassis, Comtel brought first hand experience in solutions for telecommunications applications and much value to the LTE NetEPC project.

The days of solely home grown solutions where one equipment manufacturer can design and build everything required for a network solution are diminishing. The embedded ecosystem is therefore invaluable and the working relationships exemplified

by Polaris Networks with Advantech and Comtel clearly represent a successful business model and demonstrate the way of the future.

Long Term Evolution networks are truly both evolutionary and revolutionary as they enable us all to use our technologies whenever and wherever we choose. The current practical and economic boundaries should not be seen as hard limits. Polaris Networks recognized this and based on their experience and knowledge created a solution that allows LTE networks to expand beyond the confines of major urban areas. Advantech’s AdvancedTCA blades in conjunction with key ecosystem partners such as Comtel helped create the high performance and robust hardware platform that was needed to give life to the high-end LTE NetEPC solution.

Do take the time to visit the individual websites for Advantech, Comtel and Polaris Networks and learn more about what they can do and how together they were able to create an integrated, scalable and cost effective LTE Evolved Packet Core.

Another unique advantage of the MIC-5333 is the increased number of available FMM sites from one to three. With two FMM Type I sites connected to the Fabric Interface and one FMM type II connected to the front panel, the flexibility in blade function personalization is extensive.

When coupled with the RTM-5104 Rear Transition Module shown in Figure 2, a fourth FMM site is available, providing an even wider range of I/O and acceleration options. The main benefit of deploying the MIC-5333 and FMMs in the NetEPC is the multitude of upgrade and service enhancement 6

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Advantech Contact Information Hotline Europe: 00-800-248-080 | Hotline USA: 1-800-866-6008 Email: NCG@advantech.com.tw Regional phone numbers can be found on our website at http://www.advantech.com/contact/

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Advantech is a Premier member of the Intel® Intelligent Systems Alliance. From modular components to market-ready systems, Intel and the 200+ global member companies of the Alliance provide the performance, connectivity, manageability, and security developers need to create smart, connected systems.

Learn more at: http://www.Intel.com/go/intelligentsystems/ alliance”Intel.com/go/intelligentsystems/alliance. ©2012 Advantech Co Ltd. All rights reserved.

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