Empirix, an Infovista company, launched a new version of for 5G Standalone (5G SA).

The platform enables mobile operators deploying 5G SA networks and enterprises deploying IoT and private 5G networks to simplify operations and derive accurate intelligence into Quality of Experience (QoE) when planning, launching, operating, optimizing and monetizing services running on 5G SA networks, whilst also reducing TCO.

5G Standalone enables revenue and agility advantages at lower cost for operators. Deploying this new and complex environment requires innovative cloud-native assurance solutions that optimize customer experiences by providing insight into 5G SA’s new Service-Based Architecture (SBA), technologies, interfaces, protocols and distributed cloud infrastructure.

Empirix KLERITY 2.1 enables mobile operators to maximize the benefits of their 5G Standalone deployments by providing end to end visibility, analytics and troubleshooting across subscribers, devices, applications, services and networks. This includes drill-down to individual call/data sessions and deep packet analysis.

Operators are designing and building cloud-native, service-based architecture of 5G SA networks using a combination of physical and virtual infrastructure, public and private clouds, and a mix of microservices and functions from multiple vendors. The separation of the Control and User Planes (CUPS), with the latter moving to the edge of the network where required to be as near to the service consumer as possible, means it is no longer sufficient to simply capture and monitor traffic: it must all be correlated. Dynamic, fluid service chains, VNFs/CNFs, underlying infrastructure resources and CUPS have resulted in new, dynamic configuration models, and operators can only truly know what has happened on the network or to service through live collection and intelligent correlation of packets to derive actionable insight.

As of March 2021, GSA had identified 68 operators in 38 countries/territories that are investing in 5G SA for public mobile networks. With just seven 5G SA networks currently launched, mobile operators are actively planning and testing 5G standalone networks. The pace of deployment of private 5G networks across a range of vertical markets is also growing rapidly, with GSA identifying 37 countries/territories with private network deployments based on LTE or 5G or LTE or 5G-suitable private network spectrum licenses.

KLERITY 2.1’s cloud-native functions enable a more efficient use of compute, storage and networking resources. Together with powerful, flexible search capabilities, pre-built visualizations, KLERITY delivers a path to closed-loop automation and AI/ML, providing not only a faster time to root cause but ultimately autonomous network and service monitoring and assurance.

Cloud-native by design, KLERITY 2.1 is based on Kubernetes (K8s), a production-grade container orchestration framework for deployment, scaling and management. It integrates with network orchestrators and infrastructure management APIs and leverages best-in-class carrier-grade open-source technologies. KLERITY is infrastructure-agnostic and deployable on bare metal, virtual machines and containers across public and private cloud environments and datacenters, enabling rapid flexible deployments with lower operating costs that can seamlessly change and scale as required.

“5G standalone makes traditional network topologies irrelevant and legacy approaches to network and service assurance outdated,” said Edoardo Rizzi, Chief Product Officer at Empirix. “The future of network-cloud management, service fulfilment and operations is now directly linked to process automation in real-time with zero human intervention. By taking a cloud-native by design approach, the new KLERITY solution framework gives operators the actionable insight and intelligence they need to be able to deliver a multi-cloud, multi-vendor, multi-access network by correlating and contextualizing network and service data.”

KLERITY delivers unified, correlated, end-to-end and highly granular visibility, monitoring, analytics and troubleshooting across subscribers, devices, applications, services and networks – irrespective of the 5G lifecycle stage.

5G SA Assurance: Network and Service Roll-out:

- Technology evaluation & insights into the new SBA with end-to-end call flow visualization

- Network function vendor evaluation with comparison & benchmarking

- Field Trial evaluation & traffic profiling

- End to end vendor interoperability performance & troubleshooting of subscriber and protocol issues at packet/session levels

- Network design validation including user plane and control plane (CUPS) visualization & correlation and bandwidth & latency performance in Edge deployments

5G SA Assurance: Launch, Operations, Optimization & Monetization:

- Proactive & preventative operations with performance & quality degradation alerts

- SLA management of uRLLC, eMBB and mMTC KPIs & KQIs

- Network, service & application performance, and subscriber experience troubleshooting

- End to end network & service performance, quality & experience health dashboards

- Reduced MTTR with Root Cause Analysis of subscribers & protocols

- Visualize and troubleshoot inter-RAT 3G/4G/5G performance degradations