IMSI/IMEI filtering

Customer retention is one of the biggest challenges faced by todays service providers.

Better visibility into the user network traffic leads to higher level of customer satisfaction, however with todays networks carrying hundreds of Gigabit/s of data being able to support a single mobile subscriber is extremely difficult.

To a mobile carrier, overcoming this to specifically focus on their top customers who bring them more revenue gives them a competitive edge in today’s environment where subscribers can choose from several options of service available on the market.

Using a combination of network TAPs and packet brokers allows a solution involving layer 1 tapping, aggregation, load balancing to traffic correlation and IMSI filtering. 

To enable troubleshooting, the ability to monitor and trace is vital and
requires both signalling and user data of a specific customer of
the mobile network.

This presents 2 significant challenges:

1. Finding all signalling and user-plane traffic of a specific IMSI, MSISDN or IMEI amongst the massive amounts of data traversing the network.

2. Scalability – Due to massive traffic growth scalability is a necessity in order to meet increasing customer demand.

Traffic access

Using splitter TAPs at vEPC enables access to traffic at network layer 1. The traffic from the TAPs can be then aggregated by network packet brokers operating across layers 1-4 at the vEPC sites.

Load balancing

Layer 1-7 aware packet brokers can then perform GTP load balancing base don the customer IP address and distribute the specific users traffic evenly to an IMSI filtering solution.

IMSI filtering

Finally IMSI filtering is carried our to identify all signalling and user traffic belinging to the specific subscriber. All these correlated packets are then delivered to an external analysis solution.