Gigamon and Nokia deliver 5G network visibility solution

A joint Gigamon and Nokia 5G solution aims to meet the business needs at the intersection of market demands and performance requirements.

With the number of 5G connections expected to grow from roughly 10 million in 2019 to over 1 billion in 2023, the need to optimise performance is vital to delivering compelling, scalable customer experience across the network, says a statement from Gigamon.

Mobile service provider investments in the infrastructure needed to support this growth and ensure the 5G experience lives up to the hype – they are expected to invest USD$1 trillion worldwide between 2018 and 2025.

Gigamon delivers real-time analytics for its global customers, providing the network traffic visibility required by 5G providers for seamless performance.

A consistent quality of experience in 5G use-cases, such as video streaming and cloud gaming, is critical to ensuring customer satisfaction and widespread adoption.

Video accounts for more than 80% of traffic across mobile networks and Nokia Bell Labs Consulting research forecasts the cloud gaming market to reach USD$3 billion by 2024.

Gamers and movie-lovers typically have limited tolerance for network delays and interruptions that degrade QoE, so maintaining continuous video quality is crucial.

Real-time analytics provide an end-to-end view on quality, with AI generating automated recommendations that help mobile service providers maintain the expected QoE.

As an example, the Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric is currently in place to enhance Nokia's Predictive Video Analytics service, which can lead to a reduction in buffering in video streaming services by up to 60%.

With the latest capabilities from Gigamon, mobile service providers are able to lower costs by utilising traffic optimisation intelligence to significantly reduce traffic volume with packet deduplication, subscriber-aware sampling, subscriber-aware whitelisting, application-aware filtering, advanced flow slicing and TLS 1.3 decryption.

This combination of capabilities allows mobile service providers to manage the prohibitive tool and probe costs by maximising existing investments and increasing resource agility.

"Gigamon's subscriber-aware processing of 5G user plane traffic helps enhance our Nokia AVA AI as a Service. The ability to coherently filter, sample, balance and deliver the user sessions, coupled with video data records generation, when combined with Nokia machine-learning algorithms and domain expertise, enables mobile subscribers to enjoy the full benefits of the 5G experience," says Nokia network cognitive service unit head Dennis Lorenzin.

Gigamon president and chief operating officer Shane Buckley adds, "Next-generation communications must deliver an unparalleled user experience and we are excited to partner with Nokia to deliver flawless 5G streaming and gaming quality.

"Our purpose-built product set delivers the cost-effective, scalable and pervasive network traffic visibility required to access the real-time, actionable insights into mobile over-the-top (OTT) video traffic needed to maintain world-class user experience.