virtualized evolved packet core solution guide · virtualized evolved packet core solution guide...

Virtualized Evolved Packet Core Solution Guide

Release

10.0

Modified: 2018-01-28

Copyright © 2018, Juniper Networks, Inc.

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Virtualized Evolved Packet Core Solution GuideRelease 10.0Copyright © 2018 Juniper Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Virtualized Evolved Packet Core Solution Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

About This Solution Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Understanding the vEPC Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Market Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Solution Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Solution Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Solution Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

iiiCopyright © 2018, Juniper Networks, Inc.

CHAPTER 1

Virtualized Evolved Packet Core SolutionGuide

• About This Solution Guide on page 5

• Understanding the vEPC Solution on page 5

About This Solution Guide

This guide describes the mobile solutions guide for Telco Clouds called Contrail Cloud

Release 10.0. Contrail Cloud Release 10.0 is a Telco cloud solution designed for Tier-2

and Tier-3 Telco and Cable MSOs. There are over 800mobile operators that are trying

to cope with the growing demands of today’s mobile users. The goal of this solution is

to provide the fulfillment and support of the entire Telco Cloud solution to enable these

mobile operators. Contrail Cloud Release 10.0 addresses the manageability, operations,

reliability, performance, and cost of a Telco Cloud with a focus on specific customer

use-cases.Thisguidedescribes thesolutioncomponentsandtheir interactionsspecifically

around commonmobile use-cases.

The primary audience for this solution guide are Tier-2 and Tier-3 mobile operators.

Understanding the vEPC Solution

• Market Overview on page 5

• Solution Overview on page 7

• Solution Implementation on page 8

• Solution Benefits on page 15

Market Overview

The unprecedented growth in the number of users, devices, websites, applications, and

the need for increased bandwidth to runmobile networks havemade Telco operators

look for efficient and cost-effective solutions. As a result, they have narrowed down to

a set of well-defined use-cases aroundMobility withMVNO, IoT and Small/Macro Cells.

There is also a growing demand in the SD-WAN and Enterprise connectivity services.

However, in spite of market growth, Tier 1 Telco vendors are unable to deliver solutions

on time, because of the complexities of integration, development, and operational

5Copyright © 2018, Juniper Networks, Inc.

expertise. And, Tier-2 Telcos are strugglingwith immature integrated stacks from today’s

service integrators.

Telco Cloud for Mobility hasmany layers of complexity and needs an integrated solution.

Oneof themainapplications that isused tohandlemobilitydemands isMobility’sEnhance

Packet Core (vEPC). Figure 1 on page 6 shows the EPC functional blocks and the

corresponding technical requirementsneeded tobuildandoperateaTelcocloudsolution

running a vEPC, which includes GI-LAN, Line of business (LoB) IoT platform, MVNO(s),

etc.

Figure 1: Telco Cloud Requirements for Mobile

Figure 2 on page 7 shows what a sample EPC would require along with its Telco cloud

requirements and also how the LoBs are aligned to EPC functional blocks to define a set

of the technical requirements that are needed to build and operate these functional

blocks .

Copyright © 2018, Juniper Networks, Inc.6


Figure 2: EPC Functional Blocks and Telco Cloud Requirements

Solution Overview

Telcos need an integrated stack that follows an as-a-Service (aaS) consumptionmodel

that cansupport thegrowthofbusiness. This is alsoneeded tokeepupwith theenormous

increase in the number of users, devices, websites, applications, and the bandwidth

needed to scale a mobile network, and to make innovation and quick addition of

value-added services possible. Telcos need to managemany distributed and smaller

sized PODs in a significantly smaller number of computers across many CO/POPs as

compared to a centralized datacenter model. Telcos need the flexibility to access these

PODs located on either a container or VM platform. In addition, they need the flexibility

to move these workloads to and from a private or public cloud securely when needed.


Chapter 1: Virtualized Evolved Packet Core Solution Guide

Figure 3: Contrail’s Telco Cloud POD

Solution Implementation

Figure 4 on page 8 shows how the vRPC solution components interact with one another.

Figure 4: Solution Components and Interaction

Contrail Cloud Release 10.0 consists of three main components.



• The platform, which includes Contrail Networking 4.0, RHOSP10 and OSPD. The

platform also includes the orchestration system, which is a combination of Contrail

ServerManager, Ansible andContrail-Puppet. Contrail ServerManager communicates

with the relevantAnsibleandContrail-Puppet scripts to install andupgrade the system.

• The vEPC VNF, which includes Affirmed EMS, Mobile Content Core (MCC) and Mobile

Management Entity (MME).

• The vSRX VNF, which includes two or more vSRX instances in scale-out (depending

on sizing requirements).

A new orchestration UI manages, monitors, and configures the tenant workloads. This

Orchestration UI leverages a combination of OpenStack HEAT, AppFormix and Mobility

EMS.

Figure 5 on page 9 shows the components of the Contrail Cloud 10.0 solution.

Figure 5: Contrail Cloud 10.0 Components

The Affirmed vEPCVNF includes Affirmed EMS,Mobile Content Core (MCC), andMobile

Management Entity (MME). Affirmed vEPC provides a flexible, highly-scalable,

carrier-class VNF software. It combines sessions andmobility management, policy and

charging control,Wi-Fi interoperability, DPI, orchestration, automation, and value-added

services like videoandweboptimization. Figure6onpage 10 is agraphical representation

of the Contrail Cloud Release 10.0 integrated solution.



Figure 6: Contrail Cloud Release 10.0, Affirmed VNF and Juniper's vSRX

The Affirmed VNF architecture comprises multiple independently scalable network

elements.

Figure 7: Affirmed's VNF Architecture

The Affirmed VNF has a very flexible, scale-out architecture to size your Telco Cloud.

Contrail Cloud Release 10.0 supports three deployment types based on the following

call models:

LargeMediumSmallCall Model



5M1M100000Total number of subscribers

100202Total throughput (Gbps)

--4Total number of servers needed

--27Total number of VMs

--88Total number of vCPUs

--288Total memory (GB)

--750Total storage (GB)

To deliver a Telco cloud solution, performance is key. Contrail has a proven track record

of delivering high performance in each release. It has consistently improved on

performance starting with kernel vRouter with TCP Optimized Forwarding (TSO) in

Contrail 1.0 to the most recent release of Contrail 4.0 with vRouter forwarding installed

in the SmartNIC hardware.

Figure 8: HowContrail Solves & Delivers: Performance

A vEPC consists of a control plane, data plane, and load balancer VMs at the front-end.

TheseVMshandle the3GPPpacketprocessingportionsof theVNF.This iswheremobility

traffic ingresses and egresses from the RAN side and Internet side. The Operations,

Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) VMs provide the system configuration and

validation as well as the VNFmanagement of alerts, etc. The Mobile Gateway and

Management VMs scale-out to handle the subscriber capacity and context. Each vEPC

building block is designed to support either a 1+1 redundancy or a scale-out to provide

resiliency from any single point of failure as illustrated in Figure 9 on page 12.



Figure 9: HowContrail Solves & Delivers: vEPC Connectivity

If you takeamoredetailed look, a critical componentofbothmulti-tenancyandscale-out

connectivity, BGPaaS enables a vEPC to deposit a set of routes it wants to advertise to

either the RAN or Internet to perform an EPC service. It also may want to receive routes

from the Contrail Controllers to make application decisions and load balancing.

The need for a scale-out data plane is solved using Contrail’s Equal Cost Multi-Path

(ECMP). ECMP ensures you hash across available endpoints to balance the traffic load

and is helpful not only in the efficient use of VM resources but also in mitigating the risk

when a failure occurs. Contrail’s ECMP provides “intelligent hashing” across multiple

paths such that if a next-hop in the list of paths goes offline, flow hashing is not

re-calculated. For example, consider four computes that are next hops for a destination.

If one of the four computes goes offline, flows are not recalculated for traffic going to

the remaining three computes. Only the flows going to the compute that is offline are

recalculated and sprayed across the remaining three computes. This “flow stickiness”

for the non-impacted traffic is critical for flow aware applications. This is a key feature

when dealing with stateful VNFs.

The ability of the EPC to includemultiple APN/MVNOs is key to how the Telco cloud can

create new revenue streams. To do this, there needs to bemeasures taken to secure it

andprovide theneeded servicesbetween theEPCand the Internet.With theproliferation

of devices connected, mobile customers must be able to access the internet safely. This

also requires the ability to leverage a scalablemethod of advertising connectivity. As you

can see below there are two service instances, the firewall and PAT/NAT services. These

services are “service chained” between theEPCand theGateway. By leveragingContrail’s

Service Chaining, Network Policy and Route Reorigination/Route Policy, you can secure

your EPC and its APN/MVNO customers from the internet.



https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/contrail3.0/topics/concept/bgp-as-a-service-overview.html

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/contrail3.0/topics/task/configuration/service-chaining-vnc.html

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/contrail3.0/topics/task/configuration/creating-policies-juniper-vnc.html

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/contrail3.0/topics/task/configuration/service-chain-route-reorig-vnc.html

Figure 10: HowContrail Solves & Delivers: vEPC Firewall/PAT ServiceChaining

Another use-case in EPC is RAN/FemtoCell connectivity when the radio towers aren’t

located in the countries where Telco is headquartered in and requires backhaul to the

vEPC. This allows connectivity from the customer site to the APN/MVNO to allow the

MVNOtoextend its service to regions throughout theworld. ThisSecureTunneling service

can be scaled-out to handle the growing number of RAN/FemtoCells as needed using

ECMP.

Figure 11: How Contrail Solves & Delivers: vEPC IPSEC Service

Amobile service requires access to content all the time. This content needs to be

optimized formobile andalso requiresDPI, Firewall andPAT/NATservices. UsingContrail

service-chaining, as illustrated in Figure 12 on page 14, services can be inserted into

infrastructure to protect it as well as elastically scale using ECMP, to what is required to

support each service.



Figure 12: HowContrail Solves &Delivers: vEPCContent &Media ServiceChaining

By being able to dynamically insert SPI/DPI as well as HTTP Proxy/Video caching, the

MVNO optimizes theWeb content experience for its users.

Figure 13: HowContrail Solves & Delivers: vEPC ParentalControl/ADC/Web Protection/Optimization Service Chaining

The final component to Contrail’s Mobile Solution is the operationalization of the Telco

cloud. This requires the right Operation’s tools for Telco cloud operators to answer the

questions most Telco cloud operators have today. For example, figuring out the VNF to

computemapping. This is solved by using AppFormix which has a logical representation

of their VNFs using tagging. Another example of a problem a Telco cloud operator might

face is about the number of resources the VNF consumes. This is solved by using

AppFormix and by combining tagging and the infrastructure KPIs that AppFormix is

monitoring. Finally, Telco cloud operators might also need to map 3GPP KPIs into

AppFormix and Contrail infrastructure metrics. This is solved with AppFormix by pulling

key 3GPP KPIs from the EPC’s OAMVMs and correlate them to infrastructure events like

flows/second spikes or interface speed spikes from the vEPC gathered by Contrail

Analytics.



Figure 14: HowContrail SolvesMobile Operator Problems &Delivers:Analytics, Operations, andMonitoring

Solution Benefits

By using Contrail withmobility vEPC in a fully integrated stack, you can solve the number

of users, devices, websites, applications and bandwidth needed to run amobile network

and because it’s an integrated stack it is efficient and cost-effective. The complexities

of managing many distributed and smaller sized PODs in a significantly smaller number

of computesacrossmanyCO/POPsmakes thisproblemexponentiallymorechallenging.

In addition to this, Contrail gives Telco operators a platform to innovate and quickly

introduce new value added services that previously took too long to introduce because

of lackof integration, developmentandoperational expertise.Theseproblemshavebeen

resolved in Contrail Cloud Release 10.0.



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