As the demand for network bandwidth continues to accelerate, telecom operators are constantly challenged to meet client needs driven by video streaming, additional devices, and the cloud. Carriers can now meet those needs with netElastic Virtual Broadband Network Gateway (vBNG) software and white box servers from Lanner.
The overwhelming growth in internet traffic shows no signs of slowing down. The good news for service providers is consumers want and will pay for high bandwidth services. The bad news is accelerating demand for more bandwidth is putting pressure on broadband providers to repeatedly upgrade their network infrastructure.
Additionally, to grow revenue and remain competitive, carriers must continue to add advanced services such as triple-play and quad-play bundles, home security and surveillance, and public hotspots, among other services, putting further stress on existing network infrastructure.
Unfortunately, most traditional BNGs are built on proprietary hardware platforms that come with high costs and limited scalability. Traditional BNGs also encourage over-provisioning, which results in large upfront costs that aren’t matched by customer revenue. Thus, carriers are challenged to increase network scalability without having to overprovision network hardware or perform a forklift upgrade to meet exploding demand for both new and existing services.
The Solution: netElastic Virtual BNG
Unlike traditional BNGs, netElastic uses white box platforms from hardware manufacturers like Lanner for greater scalability, flexibility, and lower costs. netElastic vBNG is also designed to deliver unmatched performance with a highly optimized data plane and patented packet processing techniques. vBNG separates the control plane and data plane, with the control plane running the network operating system on a virtual machine containing a comprehensive suite of network service functions. The data plane runs the packet-forwarding engine, enabling line-rate data transfer.
Both the control plane and data plane can scale up/down to meet performance needs, and they can run in different hosts to take advantage of CPU cores to maximize performance and scalability. The netElastic vBNG data plane can also be expanded across multiple hosts to obtain the performance of dedicated hardware BNGs, while still benefiting from the greater flexibility and lower-costs of a virtualized solution.
vBNG is deployed at the subscriber network edge, in the same fashion as traditional BNG or BRAS. It controls subscriber access to the network, while performing management functions such as authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), access security, policy management, and Quality of Services (QoS). The diagram below shows a standard deployment of vBNG at the first aggregation point in the subscriber access network.
Robust Subscriber Management Capability
vBNG’s advanced subscriber management capabilities lower operational costs and accelerate time to market by providing flexibility for access, authentication, and QoS offerings. vBNG is designed to support high concentrations of subscribers and supports all common BNG access features such as PPPoE and IPoE, and also supports subscriber IP address management functions such as DHCP, DHCP Proxy, DHCP Relay, and DHCP Option 60. Each single control plane can support up to 128,000 users concurrently and throughput can be scaled by expanding the data plane across additional nodes as necessary.
High Performance and Throughput
netElastic vBNG leverages Intel’s Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) coupled with netElastic optimized code to enhance forwarding performance. vBNG also takes advantage of the ever-increasing power of Lanner white box servers to provide the elastic scalability that carriers need. vBNG delivers up to 160Gbps throughput on a single server and can be scaled to support multi-terabit services. The data plane can also be scaled-out across multiple servers to increase total bandwidth capacity.
Lanner Whitebox Solutions
By leveraging our expertise in network security and IT edge computing, Lanner white box server NCA-1515 provides a true vBNG platforms that meet most of the specifications that customers are looking for, as well as WiFi and LTE certifications that enable them to be deployed globally.
The NCA-1515 features robust virtualization performance, cryptographic acceleration and commercial-grade LAN functions in a desktop form factor with size of 231 x 200 x 44mm (WxDxH). Packed with Intel® Atom™ C3000 Series CPU (Denverton) with DPDK, SR-IOV, AES-NI and QAT support, NCA-1515 greatly delivers optimized virtualization performance and offloads computationally intensive encryption/decryption tasks. For hardware security and management, the NCA-1515 is also armed with solid firmware security and remote manageability, including secure boot, boot guard and TPM 1.2/2.0 and IPMI remote control/monitoring platform.
The NCA-1515 offers 0~40°C operating temperatures with maximal 32GB DDR4 2400MHz memory. For flexible deployment as a white box server, the NCA-1515 can be configured with different LAN configurations, such as A. 4x RJ45, 2x SFP+, 2x RJ45, B. 4x RJ45, 2x GbE SFP+ and C. 4x GbE RJ45
Fitted with up to six antennas for enhanced 4G/LTE/Wifi connectivity, the NCA-1515 features 2x mini-PCIe slots and 1x M.2 2242 slot with dual nano SIMs, not only making device deployment at remote offices and distributed locations possible but also enabling SD-WAN portals capable of delivering add-on VNF services such as VoIP, VPN, firewall and QoE. Other I/O includes 1x RJ45 console, 2x USB 2.0, and 1x optional 2.5" HDD/SSD bay.
