OCP summit 2019 presentation for working on developing Network Packet Broker (NPB) using P4.

2. Cost-effective Approach for
Telco Network Analysis in 5G
Junho Suh, Research Engineer, SK Telecom
email: junho.suh@sk.com
Telco
TELCO

3. Agenda
• Introduction to TINA Project
• Architecture
• Use cases
• Network Visibility Fabric Node
• Hardware spec

4. TINA (SKT integrated Network Analytics)
Network Visibility Platform for Telco
• Provide end-to-end network visibility to Telco network infrastructure operators
• Reduce TCO by over 50%
• Open hardware/software approach
• Launched @2017
Use cases
• SKT’s subscriber-faced service traffic monitoring
• LTE/5G interface monitoring
• IPTV headend monitoring
• …

5. PDN
S5
MME
UE
eNB
SGW
PGW
S1-MME
S1-U
S11
gNBX2
MME
HHS
Internet
DC
High-Level Design
Network Traffic
from Tap
from Mirror (e.g., SPAN or ERSPAN)
Network
Packet
Broker
Probes1
Probes2
Probes3
…
e.g., IDS, Firewall, Netflow generator
Data Collection (Control Plane Telemetry, Data Plane Telemetry, Packet
Metadata)
Real-time Streaming Big Data Processing Big Data Warehouse
Unified SQL-like Query Engine
3DV WebUI (Dashboard)
Today Talk covers
Network Visibility Node
Big Data Analysis Engine

6. Use Case #1 - Network Performance Monitoring for
SKT Services
Monitoring north/south bound traffic of 200+ subscriber-faced services such as Security
Camera (T-View), Smart Speaker (NUGU), Navigation (T-Map), etc in SKT private data
center
What to measure?
• Network traffic statistics
• Total traffic volume in bytes and packets, and # flows/each service
• TCP session performance
• Connection Time, RTT, Retransmission rates, Retransmission delay, Throughput
• Anomaly detection using ML technique
• Abrupt traffic explosion/reduction
• Volume-based DDoS attack

7. Use Case #2 - IPTV Service Quality Monitoring
Monitoring traffic of SKB IPTV service (Btv) Head-end that serves globally
dispersed content across 600+ domains
What to measure?
• DNS lookup time
• Content location
• DNS resolution result from
Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB)
• HTTP transaction performance
• TCP connection time

8. Use Case #3 - LTE/5G Network Quality Monitoring and
Troubleshooting (under PoC)
Monitoring LTE/5G interfaces including S1-MME, S10, S11, S1-U
• Export External Data Representation (xDR) format
What to measure?
• Call flow (LTE/5G signaling)
• Attach, Detach
• S1/X2 Handover
• Paging
• …
• TCP/UDP/HTTP/RTP/SIP performance/each mobile subscriber

9. Agenda
• Introduction to TINA Project
• Network Visibility Fabric Node
• Network Packet Broker
• DPDK-based Network Visibility Probe/Packet Recorder
• Hardware spec

10. Network Packet Broker (NPB)
• L2~L4 based filter
• MAC address, ether type
• IPv4/6 address, protocol type
• L4 src/dst port#
• Packet processing
• Forward/Load Balance/Replicate
• Packet slicing
• Packet stripping
• Source port labeling
• Tunnel termination
• Metadata generation (experimental)
• For Telco specific
• GTP protocol aware
• Tunnel Endpoint ID (TEID)
• Inner user packet headers and load
balancing
• IEEE 1588 time synchronization & time
stamp

11. Language
P4 is a formal language
• Target independent that abstract
• Barefoot Tofino, NPU, FPGA
• DIY / Flexible / Versatile
• Easy to optimize packet processing pipeline
• memory resources (especially for TCAM) for each use case
• Auto-generated P4 program access API (e.g., P4runtime)
Easy to develop/test/bug fix/proof future features more faster than ever
-> reduce engineering cost (a cycle of dev to deploy loop from 1Yr to 3M)

12. npb.p4-16
• P4-16
• Port / Port Group
• Ingress/Egress Filter
• Forward/Load balance (normal, symmetric, resilient)/Replicate
• IEEE 1588 based Time stamping (nanosecond granularity)
• 64-bit time stamp (32b second, 32b nanosecond)
• ERSPAN type III or INT (In-band Network Telemetry)
• C/C++ API
• Metadata generation*
• GTP session-aware traffic steering**

13. Network Visibility Probe/Packet Recorder
• x86 commodity server & DPDK
• Utilize DPDK to pump up raw packet to
applications
• Leverage RSS (Receive Side Scaling) to load
balance packets to CPU cores assigned
• CPU pinning (*heuristic)
• Performance
• Achieve 100Gbps throughput and generate 5M
flows/sec w/ ~100% utilization of 24 cores
• Achieve total 40Gbps packet recording/a node
• GUI based management
• Multiple FloX control on a single page
• Wireshark-like analysis - I/O graph,
endpoints, conversations, packet decoding,
etc.
• Packet dynamics across multiple links

14. Agenda
• Introduction to TINA Project
• Network Visibility Fabric Node
• Hardware spec

15. Network Packet Broker
Barefoot Tofino (2T, 6.5T) w/ whitebox (BSP) vendor
collaboration
BF6064X-TBF2556X-1T
IEEE1588V2 Transparent and Boundary Clock Support
Tofino Data Plane Programmability with P4
ONIE Bootloader preinstalled
Supported Speeds form 1GbE to 100GbE
Management via Out-of-Band SDN Controller
Powerful Hardware
Key Features

16. Packet Recorder (FloX)
• 4 RU
• 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6134 Processors (2x
8C)
• 4x 32GB DDR4 ECC-RDIMM
• 24x 8TB NL-SAS 12Gb/s 7.2K RPM
• Intel x710-DA4 (4x SFP+)
• LSI SAS 3224 controller, 24 internal
12Gb/s SAS and SATA ports
• Portable
• Intel Core i7-8700 i7 1ea
• ASRock Z370 Extreme 4 1ea
• DDR4 16GB PC4-21300 4ea
• Samsung 960 Pro 1TB M.2 NVMe 2ea
• Intel X710-DA2 1ea

17. Network Visibility Probe (SDV)
• 2RU
• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 CPU (Haswell)
• Up to 512GB RAM
• 4X 2.5` SATA SSD
• Intel RRC (Red Rock Canyon)-based NIC
• w/ Intel atom based CPU board for ASIC management
• x4 ethernet controller w/ PCIe gen3 (up to 200Gbps) connected to
server part
• Pluggable port module (3 slots)
• x12 10G
• x4 10G + x2 40G
https://www.slideshare.net/JunhoSuh/specification-skt-cna-ssx2rc-20160821
https://www.slideshare.net/JunhoSuh/ocp-summit-2016-transforming-networks-to-allit-network-with-ocp-and-open-networking

18. Open/Together
¹ TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Center; startup accelerator for innovative ecosystem of Telecom Infrastructure space. There are four TEAC global operators: SK Telecom (Seoul), British Telecom
(UK), Orange (France) and Deutsche Telekom (Germany).
² Telecom Infra Project; founded with the purpose of creating a collaborative telecom technologies community for design, build and implementation.
Network Packet Broker
Npb.p4-16 Prism NPB agent