[Dell’Oro]: Flexible NFV Licensing Causes Modest EPC Market Growth

A new report by Chris DePuy [pictured], VP, Dell’Oro Group finds that "the Wireless Packet Core Equipment market is forecast to reach almost $5.5 billion by 2019. The faster-growing portion of the packet core market, the Evolved Packet Core segment, is expected to grow nearly 25 percent from 2015 to 2019.

.. We expect that as NFV-based packet core systems are adopted by service providers, more flexible licensing terms will emerge that change pricing dynamics icenses that transfer from one system to another and pay-as-you-go licensing are catalysts to adopting annualized billing, which differs from perpetual licensing terms common today .. Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Cisco, Huawei, Nokia and ZTE seen benefitting in the market overall"

See "Evolved Packet Core Revenues to Grow Nearly 25% by 2019, According to Dell’Oro Group Forecas" - here.

Alepo Enters the Diameter Routing Market

   

The recent surge in the Diameter Router market (forecast here and here) leads more players to enter the market (list here), in which a significant portion are policy management players that already have the Diameter protocol and environment expertise.

The new kid in the block is Alepo, that announced ".. the introduction of the Alepo Diameter Signaling Controller (DSC) to its suite of Evolved Packet Core (EPC) control plane network solutions .. Alepo successfully tested its Diameter Signaling Controller and PCRF in multiple local and roaming interoperability test scenarios." 



"The Alepo Diameter Signaling Controller serves two main functions, either as a network border element to facilitate roaming and interconnect scenarios between EPCs, or as a Diameter Routing Agent [see chart below] within the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) to streamline communication between network nodes and enhance network performance."

See "Alepo Announces Diameter Signaling Controller (DSC), Interoperability Success" - here.

NSN: Policy based Traffic Management with Flexi NG + DPI

  

During MWC 2009 Nokia Siemens Networks announced its Evolved Packet Core (EPC) network solution for LTE - see "Nokia Siemens Networks brings LTE one step closer with EPC launch at Mobile World Congress 2009" - here, composed of two products -  Flexi Network Server and the Flexi Network Gateway (NG).

"The Flexi Network Gateway addresses the higher than ever demand for broadband connectivity, combined with the intelligence needed for flexible handling of data traffic according to policy rules of the operator's choice .. Building this new Evolved Packet Core on open ATCA technology allows Nokia Siemens Networks to tap into a hardware supply ecosystem and focus its own efforts on developing specific value added network functionality. Customers will benefit from a more coherent equipment practice across the market, which brings operational synergies."

Since then, the product was mentioned in several customer wins and trials, most recent one was MegaFon Russia - see "Russia tunes in to LTE" - here - but the web site does not have much on the product itself.

Nevertheless, in a presentation posted to NSN's Japanese site (here), we can find a slide (see below), describing how Flexi NG, with DPI support, may implement intelligent traffic management policies (more on NSN's PCRF product, PCS-5000, here).

Little help on translation (courtesy of Google Translate):

• Title - Value Innovation - Advanced Solution (Deep Packet Inspection)
• 2nd line -policy "triggers" - location, time, applications accessed, device type, network access type and volume balance
• In the network elements diagram - operation and charging elements
• The last line is the policy action list, including: QoS priority control, bandwidth allocation, service control, reporting, port re-direction (?), charging, optimization, filtering and security