Selective user plane monitoring multiple monitoring probes when a serving gateway has multiple IP addresses

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-11228929-B2
Application number	US-202016817421-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Mar 12, 2020
Priority date	Sep 29, 2017
Publication date	Jan 18, 2022
Grant date	Jan 18, 2022

Abstract

A system for selective user plane (UP) monitoring includes a service gateway (SGW) having a plurality of units. The system further includes a network packet broker (NPB) configured to receive packets including UP data from tunnels created to enable transmission of the UP packets from UE to the plurality of SGW units. The NPB is also configured to receive packets including control plane (CP) data from channels enabling transmission of the CP packets from a base transceiver station to the SGW. The system also includes a plurality of probes operatively coupled to the NPB. The probes are configured to generate first metrics associated with the received CP packets and to selectively generate second metrics associated with the received UP packets based on one or more identifiers. The NPB is configured to forward UP packets being processed by a particular SGW unit to a particular probe of the plurality of probes.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A system for selective user plane monitoring in a wireless network, the system comprising:
a service getaway (SGW) having a plurality of units, each unit having at least one processor, a memory and a unique IP address;
a network packet broker configured to receive a plurality of packets comprising user plane data from one or more tunnels created to enable direct transmission of user plane packets from user equipment to the plurality of SGW units and configured to receive a plurality of packets comprising control plane data from one or more channels created to enable transmission of control plane packets from a base transceiver station to the SGW; and
a plurality of monitoring probes operatively coupled to the network packet broker, the monitoring probes are configured to generate a first plurality of metrics associated with the control plane packets and configured to selectively generate a second plurality of metrics associated with the user plane packets based on one or more subscriber identifiers and selectively generate a third plurality of user plane metrics for a subset of the subscriber identifiers wherein the third plurality of user plane metrics is different than the second plurality of user plane metrics,
wherein the network packet broker is configured to forward a plurality of user plane packets being processed by a particular SGW unit to a particular monitoring probe of the plurality of probes.

2. The system of claim 1 , wherein the SGW comprises a blade server and wherein each of the plurality of SGW units comprises a blade.

3. The system of claim 1 , wherein the one or more tunnels comprise encapsulated unidirectional tunnels and wherein each tunnel is associated with a particular user flow.

4. The system of claim 1 , wherein the network packet broker comprises a plurality of input ports having a collective throughput equal to or greater than collective throughput of the plurality of SGW units.

5. The system of claim 1 , wherein the network packet broker is operatively connected with each of the plurality of monitoring probes via at least two output ports having a collective throughput equal to or less than throughput of the corresponding monitoring probe.

6. The system of claim 5 , wherein each of the at least two output ports of the plurality of monitoring probes has maximum throughput of approximately 40 Giga Bytes per Second (Gbps).

7. The system of claim 1 , wherein the one or more identifiers include at least one of subscriber identifiers, location identifiers, user equipment identifiers or application identifiers.

8. The system of claim 7 , wherein the subscriber identifiers comprise at least one of an international mobile equipment identifier (IMEI) and an international mobile subscriber identifier (IMSI).

9. The system of claim 1 , wherein the received control plane packets include mappings between a plurality of subscriber identifiers and a plurality of tunnel identifiers and wherein the plurality of monitoring probes is further configured to correlate the received user plane packets with the received control plane packets using the mappings.

10. The system of claim 1 , wherein the network packet broker is configured to forward all of the user plane packets to each monitoring probe of the plurality of probes.

Assignees

• Netscout Systems Inc

Inventors

• Singhal Anil K
• Kelley Jr Bruce A
• Nadkarni Rajeev
• Byrapuram Narendra

Classifications

• H04L43/08

  Monitoring or testing based on specific metrics, e.g. QoS, energy consumption or environmental parameters · CPC title

• H04L43/0888

  Throughput · CPC title

• H04W88/16

  Gateway arrangements · CPC title

• H04L12/4633

  Interconnection of networks using encapsulation techniques, e.g. tunneling · CPC title

• H04W24/04

  Arrangements for maintaining operational condition · CPC title