Sandvine Debuts Key Enhancements to ANI Portfolio

On the heels of its recent news about joining the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program, Sandvine is announcing four key enhancements to its Application and Network Intelligence (ANI) portfolio at the Big 5G Event in Austin, TX.

Paving the way to innovation and monetization in 4G, 5G NR, and 5G Standalone are Sandvine cloud native deployments, Gaming QoE "MOS Scoring" and Classification, 5G-Policy integration, and a new NWDAF use case:

Sandvine helps organizations run world-class networks with Active Network Intelligence, leveraging machine learning analytics and closed-loop automation to identify and adapt to network behavior in real-time.

With Sandvine, organizations have the power of a highly automated platform from a single vendor that delivers a deep understanding of their network data to drive faster, better decisions.

Cloud Native Deployment for ActiveLogic Hyperscale Data Plane – Through CNCF-compliant Kubernetes-orchestrated containers and open-source components, ActiveLogic's availability as a cloud native function (CNF) accelerates application rollouts and high-impact changes. The CNF helps engineers automate delivery and rapidly fix broken builds by using DevOps best practices.

Lyndon Cantor, CEO, Sandvine said: "By first-half 2022, our entire portfolio will be available as cloud native functions, ensuring Sandvine customers get the most out of their 5G cloud deployments in terms of rapid service creation, high performance, and the flexibility to rapidly create apps and services – even across complex, multivendor environments. The horizontal scale and efficiency of cloud native will help them lower costs of innovation, as well as generate new revenue streams around network performance and Application QoE."

Gaming QoE by Type (cloud, download, online/interactive) – Improve end-user experience visibility by detecting and measuring user actions and behavioral characteristics of individual games. Sandvine's best-in-class analytics and traffic classification are enablers for real-time QoE "scoring" of performance KPIs calculated per user, per application, per location, and per device. These QoE scores indicate lag, time jumps, slow loading, failed downloads, and buffering video. Additionally, Sandvine's signature library is made up of more than 20% of gaming signatures. The close monitoring of gaming traffic, including 4K quality gaming traffic, helps planners manage congestion and keep pace with changes in gaming app algorithms, codecs, and protocols.

Don Alusha, senior analyst in ABI Research's telco digitization practice, said: "Gamers are very tech-savvy, so to meet their demands, operators have to dynamically tune the network to ensure gamers get the QoE they want. Every single gaming session is a chance to measure and monitor network experience – to truly measure gaming QoE from the viewer's perspective. This means operators are in a position to make an informed decision and choose the best actions to improve QoE, minimize churn risk, and increase upsell opportunities."

5G Integration with Policy Control Function (PCF) – To help operators easily create and seamlessly deploy policies in 4G and 5G networks, Sandvine has built an interface between its solution and customer PCFs to support use cases for Network Optimization and Revenue Generation. This new interface enables 5G operators to implement an Application Detection Function (ADC) in 5G SA networks for more innovative application-based policies and more precise control over network resources. By combining ANI with the PCF, operators can better govern subscriber services (data allocation, radio access type, subscriber services) to create more service options and a better QoE for subscribers.

New Use Case for "Observed Service Experience" – A new analytics service features sophisticated QoE scoring capabilities within Sandvine's enriched NWDAF. This new service is included within 5G Service Intelligence Engine and delivers the performance required for more complex 5G network slices. Acting as a single or additional source of metrics and KPIs, ANI becomes a trusted application function (AF) for policy and charging, per 3GPP's definition of a "centralized, predictive analytics platform for 5G core networks." The use case delivers to the NWDAF a mean opinion score (MOS) that reflects App QoE on a per user equipment, per-UE group, or network slice basis. The NWDAF then converts the MOS metrics about service experience into insight and predictions that help operators assure network and service performance, on top of which they can generate additional QoS-based revenues.