CUPS: Control User Plane Separation

Telco’s user data traffic is getting doubled every year due to the proliferation of OTT video, social media, gaming and use of smart devices. This exponential growth in the mobile traffic has led lot of architectural changes which are aligned to SDN and NFV technology. At the same time OTTs are taking advantage because Telco’s are building network and serving 70% of OTT traffic only. At the same time, there is strong demand of serving OTT traffic with low latency, high throughput and best customer experience.

To serve all these requirements, Telco’s has to penetrate deeper and deeper in the region and create more EPC locations which means number of new users are not increasing as compare to the traffic demands.

Below is the current network architecture of LTE

During the launch of LTE, this was the best in breed architecture but as the traffic demands grow the intermediator or inline nodes are becoming bottle neck and creating head of Line blocking. CUPS - Control Plane User Plane Separation solves the issue and gave a new architecture approach which is easy to implement and leverages the SDN and NFV technologies so that all the SLA’s and KPI’s can be met.

In nutshell, CUPS allows for:
1. Reducing latency on applications and OTT/Video traffic.
2. Leveraging SDN to deliver Data Plane more efficiently and better scaling in Control Plane.
3. Supporting Increase of Data Traffic, by enabling to add user plane nodes without changing the number of SGW-C, PGW-C and TDF-C in the network.

People who read this post also read :