By: Bakir MalikService providers across the board are grappling with the demand of high-bandwidth, low-latency networks in 5G deployments to support modern smart infrastructures, whose bandwidth requirements are enormous and growing exponentially. Smart city projects have become the new standard that many countries are trying to achieve. Real-time traffic management, IoT-enabled utilities, enhanced mobile broadband for urban centers, and telemedicine services are driving service providers to upgrade their infrastructure, meet these expanding bandwidth demands, and alter the way they process data.
One of the architectural changes that have occurred in the service provider environment is the deployment of Multi-Access Edge computing (MEC) nodes at the network edge of 5G deployments to reduce latency and handle massive volumes of data generated by 5G devices (e.g., IoT sensors, autonomous vehicles, AR/VR applications). This architecture provides compute resources closer to the source of traffic for faster processing and low latency, ensuring efficient and high-speed data processing.
However, securing these MEC nodes has become a predominant challenge for service providers while ensuring high performance and meeting SLAs. High-speed, high-volume traffic generated by these smart systems often seems to overwhelm traditional monitoring tools, leaving critical visibility gaps in the infrastructure and breaking the chain of continuous monitoring for security and performance metrics across the 5G cellular network.
Some of the security systems also face challenges processing raw 5G data efficiently,leading to numerous unknowns in monitoring and detection systems. Either the data is categorized as unknown, leaving the security analyst to classify it manually, or it’s simply dropped, discarding a critical piece of information that might indicate a security threat or have other significant impacts on operations.
Another problem that is often a point of concern in these high-demanding MEC nodes is the downtime caused by tool failure or upgrade process. As these MEC edge nodes are expected to operate with 99.99% uptime, any tool failure triggers a critical alarm that significantly impacts data and accessibility. Operators must ensure that the disruption is minimized during installation, upgrades, or any instance of tool failure.
However, integrating a smart visibility solution into the MEC nodes can provide a robust, fail-safe option to manage high traffic flow without compromising monitoring, security and performance.
Building a security and monitoring stack on top of a visibility infrastructure ensures efficiency, resilience and scalability at high speeds. For instance, a network packet broker (NPB) can be used to aggregate the traffic before forwarding it to multiple downstream tools. An NPB aggregates traffic from multiple 5G edge nodes (e.g., small cells, base stations) into a centralized feed, filtering out irrelevant data (e.g., non-critical IoT chatter) to reduce the load on downstream tools. This ensures that only relevant traffic (e.g., security events, QoS metrics) reaches monitoring, security and performance systems, improving efficiency and reducing costs.
An NPB also distributes processed traffic across multiple tools - a firewall, an analytics platform, and a performance monitor, based on their capacity and purpose. This prevents tool overload, enabling seamless scalability as 5G traffic grows, a critical requirement for smart city deployments supporting high-speed traffic management and robust scalability options.
The NPB can also integrate with a broader visibility fabric, providing end-to-end monitoring from edge nodes to the core network, ensuring consistent performance across the 5G infrastructure. This offers a unified view of network health, which is critical for operators managing distributed MEC environments in sprawling urban areas.
The NPB can also be paired with an external bypass switch, which ensures continuous traffic flow during tool upgrades, failures, or maintenance by rerouting packets around offline devices without interrupting 5G services. This combined architecture guarantees 99.999% uptime, a key SLA requirement for 5G edge use cases like autonomous vehicles or remote healthcare, which cann’t afford even milliseconds of downtime due to their critical nature .
Apart from the technical benefits, there are substantial financial advantages that an integrated visibility solution provides to service providers.
For instance we have observed a 20% reduction in latency through optimized traffic delivery, which enhances user experience for 5G subscribers. Additionally, a 30% reduction in tool processing overhead was achieved by filtering irrelevant traffic and providing only the most relevant, tool-specific information, lowering CapEx and OpEx costs.
The visibility fabric helps meet many regional data protection standards, enabling government visions of futuristic cities ( e.g., Saudi Vision 2030). The resilient and fail- safe infrastructure enables the upselling of premium 5G services to customers.
Summary
The integrated deployment of visibility fabric in MEC nodes serves as a critical enabler for 5G edge deployments, addressing the telecom operators’ need for visibility, security, and reliability.
By leveraging technologies like advanced NPB and bypass solutions, it helps service providers in prioritize and optimize cost-effective, high-availability solutions for next-gen 5G networks. This approach not only solves technical challenges but also aligns with many regions’ smart city and digital transformation goals.
---
Niagara Networks are industry specialists in network visibility, providing advanced network solutions for the specific needs of individual enterprises and national large and complex networks.
Don’t leave your network vulnerable to security threats, schedule a consultation with one of our network visibility experts today to evaluate your network visibility challenges.
