Spirent Communications, has successfully completed joint tests with Brocade to showcase 3GPP-compliant NB-IoT solutions. The tests utilized the Brocade vC-SGN solution, with 3GPP NB-IoT enhancements to the S1-AP interface, and Spirent Landslide, which emulates NB-IoT devices, LTE base stations and Evolved Packet Core (EPC) functions. The tests demonstrates compliance to 3GPP NB-IoT standards, the ability to support IoT device connections from up to 50,000 LTE base stations (eNBs) and automatic scaling of the vC-SGN for variable loads.
Spirent Landslide enables network equipment providers (NEPs) and service providers (SPs) to validate the functionality and performance of mobile networks and services across the lifecycle phases of development, deployment and operations. With newly released IoT test features, Spirent Landslide enables NEP development teams to ensure network functions are ready for the scale and wide range of QoS capabilities required by IoT. SPs can also use the solution to validate services across multiple network slices using the 3GPP DECOR feature. Landslide may be deployed as a virtual test agent (VTA), as part of Spirent VisionWorks active assurance solutions. Leveraging the Landslide VTA, Spirent VisionWorks solutions enable SP deployment and operations teams to automate turn-up verification and SLA monitoring of new IoT services and enabling network functions.
The Brocade vC-SGN solution is built on top of the Brocade Virtual Core for Mobile software, which is designed to transform mobile networks by providing operators with the flexibility to scale the control plane, user plane, and session plane independently. This architecture is tailor-made for implementation of control-plane-centric network functions, such as a C-SGN, and can easily scale to accommodate the high growth in IoT devices that is anticipated by the industry.
Spirent and Brocade showcased this solution at the Mobile World Congress 2017.
