Gigamon - Multicasting Data Tap Aggregation - Gigamon GigaVUE Reseller NextGig Systems, Inc.

Whitepapers - TAP & Data Aggregation & Multicasting for Telecom Networks

Going beyond VoIP, IPTV or even Triple Play, today’s unifying theme is Service-over-IP (SoIP). In other words, all revenue-generating next-gen services (voice, video and data) introduced by carriers now share the common feature that they are simply digitalized data carried over IP-based Ethernet.

SoIP will be a source of struggle – not just the obvious market-based struggle between cable providers and telcos – but a societal-based struggle between expectation and business reality. As SoIP enjoys mainstream deployment, consumers will demand Quality-of-Service that they are accustomed to with traditional medium (i.e., analog telephone and television) in spite of added features and reduced price. Similarly, government will demand unrestricted access for lawful intercept in all manners of digital communications, to be consistent with unrelenting homeland security concerns. In summary, SoIP providers can no longer ignore the harsh business reality of providing a fixed-income service while accommodating ever-growing monitoring demands.

The weapon of choice for service-oriented network monitoring is Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) which are high performance software solutions that run on standard server hardware platforms enabling providers to 1) identify, classify and even selectively block IP traffic to prevent revenue leakage from unauthorized SoIP services, 2) detect and protect against security threats and network anomalies, 3) facilitate wiretapping and reconstruction of relevant digital transactions. For the technology to work, DPI must be able to unobtrusively acquire production traffic from multiple sources across a redundant network. Recently, instead of using conventional network taps, Data Access Network (DAN) has emerged as the “Best Practice” data access and network monitoring architecture for cost-effective DPI monitoring. Currently being deployed by several major carriers in nationwide rollouts, DAN has saved tens of millions of dollars for telecom customers by aggregating tapped traffic from multiple network links, separating SoIP from non-SoIP data using hardware based packet filters, and regenerating and mapping the aggregated traffic to multiple DPI analyzers in order to optimize traffic load.

The technical challenge for DPI monitoring is akin to that of searching for pins in a haystack; more precisely, searching for fragments of pins from multiple gigantic haystacks. Recall that Ethernet was designed for data. It was meant for synchronized transmission of data broken up into fragments (i.e., packets), where the timing and the temporal order between fragments are not important. So when someone surfs the web making random requests for packets from all over the World, packets will arrive in different order and at different time slots. Some of them don't even arrive at all. The protocol embedded in Ethernet makes allowance for such chaos and diligently reassembles the fragments in proper order and make repeated requests if they are lost. This scheme works for data and surprisingly works for voice and video as well in spite of the fact that digital voice and digital video are synchronized traffic, since in this case the order and the timing between the fragments are indeed important.

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One reason why Ethernet works even for SoIP is because the pipes that make up the carrier networks are relatively large and under-utilized; therefore SoIP packets typically travel unhindered. Moreover, customers’ state-of-the-art fully meshed networks are redundant and parallelized such that there are multiple paths for the packets to travel. On the other hand, when a network engineer has to make an independent measurement of the network’s performance as it is utilized for SoIP transmission (in order to ensure SLA, for example) or when a law enforcement officer is given the mandate to track potentially illicit discourse, the fact that SoIP packets are never retransmitted (such that every single packet must be collected) and that there are unlimited paths for them to travel have imposed a huge problem. In other words, how does one comb through multiple haystacks in order to find all of the random fragments (packets) of a pin?

DAN is often described as the distributed "Data Socket" for comprehensive out-of-band network monitoring. Gigamon’s GigaVUE® Data Access Switch which is the building block of DAN is like a vacuum cleaner that sucks up the hay wherever they might exist, filters out metal fragments that possess characteristics which would materialize into a pin, and presents these relevant pieces to the DPI analyzer in order to recreate the original puzzle. The diagram on the top shows a commercial SoIP network. This is the core network typical of a long distance carrier which has a number of redundant core switches that manage traffic in and out of the SBC (Session Border Controller) and core routers that manage signaling and SoIP traffic that goes out to other switch centers (edge networks) or to the Internet. If one were to attach a DPI analyzer directly to the network, the amount of traffic would be so overwhelming that it will easily oversubscribe the tool. Moreover, so many individual tools would have to be deployed in order to fully capture all of the relevant packets from disparate critical locations across the network that no customer can ever cost-justify such a deployment.

Instead, telecom customers use a number of passive network taps to tap all of the redundant optical Gigabit links connecting the SBC to the switch, copy and filter the traffic using the GigaVUE® Data Access Switch either to extract RTP (voice) or RTCP (signaling) packets, regenerate and map (i.e., loadbalance) the aggregate to multiple DPI analyzers. In addition, GigaVUE® can accept SPAN port data from the routers to monitor outgoing traffic. Finally, for troubleshooting purpose, a protocol analyzer remotely located at the central NOC can be connected to the Data Access Switch, which would be shared among the switching centers (supporting the highly skilled network engineers).

Besides the core, telecom customers also deploy Data Access Network at the edge (see bottom picture) where basically the same connectivity functions are performed at the neighborhood hubs, passively tapping all of the Gigabit copper links that connect the CMTS (Cable Modem Termination Systems) to the edge routers, and aggregating, regenerating and filtering SoIP traffic for DPI monitoring. In summary, network monitoring using DPI analyzer is a mission critical application that is tailor-made for the best practice Data Access Network (DAN) architecture, using the GigaVUE® Data Access Switch to aggregate traffic from multiple taps, regenerate and filter aggregate traffic both at the core and the edge, and as usual is saving substantial amount of money for our telecom customers.

About Gigamon
Founded in 2003 by six veterans of network monitoring and telecommunications
equipment companies, Gigamon Systems is the inventor and leading provider of Data-Access Switches. Its flagship product, GigaVUE®, can multicast packets from one span or tap to many tools to solve the span port sharing problem. It also can aggregate and intelligently filter packets from many spans or taps to one or multiple tools to solve the problem of monitoring flows across complex mesh topologies and virtual networks. GigaVUE® facilitates unobtrusive parallel tool deployment with network-wide coverage, significantly reducing customers’ capital budgets and yielding immediate ROI benefits.