GigaSMART IP FlowVUE

The GigaSMART IP FlowVUE is supported on both Gen 2 and Gen 3 devices.

Required License: FlowVUE

GigaSMART FlowVUE supports the following:

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flow-aware sampling of subscriber devices to filter and forward all flows sourced from a sampled set of subscriber device IPs

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flexible sampling on subscriber IPs and IP ranges, and at specified sampling rates

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User-configurable timeouts to detect and replace inactive devices

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IP-based sampling of flows and IP-based flows encapsulated in GTP-u tunnels

FlowVUE offers subscriber IP-based flow sampling that helps carriers turn Big Data into manageable data. The GigaSMART application enables existing tools to connect to the latest high-speed pipes by providing a representative view of traffic for diagnostic coverage. GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP) is commonly used to carry mobile data across service provider networks and includes the control plane (GTP-c) and a user-data plane (GTP-u) traffic. FlowVUE allows for active sampling of a subscriber’s device (known as a user endpoint IP or UE IP) across GTP-u tunnels. The integrity of the subscriber flows is preserved by forwarding all the flows associated with the sampled UE IP to the monitoring and analytic tools.

In contrast, traditional methods randomly sample packets without any correlation to the flows. This provides limited visibility into subscriber behavior and experience. FlowVUE intelligently reduces the amount of traffic, while keeping the integrity of the data flows intact, but at a lower speed feed within a smaller pipe.

Leveraging FlowVUE, providers can enhance quality of experience (QoE) monitoring by forwarding all of the control plane traffic to the tools infrastructure and only perform intelligent user-plane sampling (a configurable percentage of UE IPs) to get a representative view of application usage.

When combined with the advanced filtering capabilities of GigaSMART Adaptive Packet Filtering (APF), operators can further filter, replicate, and forward specific traffic flows of interest based on application ports and packet content-based payloads for all or a subset of the sampled subscribers. This further reduces the volume of traffic to the tool infrastructure. The ability to sample a subset of subscriber devices and transmit all the associated sessions of interest to the monitoring tools, reduces the amount of data while enabling Big Data throughput processing, with existing cost structures.

FlowVUE operations can be assigned to GigaSMART groups consisting of multiple engine ports. Refer to Groups of GigaSMART Engine Ports for details.