Navigating Key Challenges and Opportunities in 5G

The advent of 5G technology marks a transformative era in telecommunications, promising unprecedented speeds, ultra-low latency, and enhanced connectivity. However, with these advancements come significant challenges, particularly in the realm of network monitoring. NETSCOUT has a variety of solutions to the most common challenges with 5G deployment, helping carriers provide an improved user experience to boost customer retention and the bottom line.

Understanding the Complexity of 5G Networks

Network complexity and density
5G networks are characterized by their complexity and density, driven by technologies such as Massive MIMO and beamforming. These innovations enhance performance but complicate monitoring due to dynamic beam steering and user-specific signal paths. Additionally, the deployment of small cells increases the number of network elements that require management. The integration of 5G with existing 4G, Wi-Fi, and other technologies further necessitates a unified monitoring approach across heterogeneous networks.

NETSCOUT solutions:

• nGeniusONE for Carrier: Provides carrier-grade visibility into voice, video, over-the-top (OTT), and data services across 5G non-standalone (NSA) and standalone (SA) deployments. With this insight, carriers can determine who is causing the performance issue, improving troubleshooting efficiency. The packet-level insights collected by nGeniusONE for Carrier can be extracted and shared with third parties, such as streaming providers, to help expedite resolutions.
• InfiniStreamNG: Captures and analyzes packet-level data for both control and user planes, enabling deep visibility across multivendor and multidomain networks.
• Kubernetes and extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) solutions: 5G SA networks are cloud-native and have containers and microservices. At times, these solutions are made up of multiple vendors’ offerings, such as Open RAN, making monitoring more difficult due to complexity. With eBPF and Kubernetes solutions from NETSCOUT, carriers can gain full edge-to-edge monitoring capabilities and visibility into the application layer seven.

Customer Experience Monitoring

QoE versus QoS

Traditional metrics such as quality of service (QoS) may not accurately reflect the actual user experience, known as quality of experience (QoE). This discrepancy necessitates more-sophisticated monitoring tools that account for device diversity and varying performance across locations and applications.

NETSCOUT solutions:

• nGenius Session Analyzer (nSA): Isolating root causes of call drops is key to troubleshooting and prioritizing. With nSA, carriers can collect packet-level insights into the cause of dropped calls and which devices are causing them, to understand the breadth of the issue and where to place attention to remedy the situation.
• Customizable key performance indicators (KPIs): The NETSCOUT solution allows for fully customizable sets of KPIs to meet carrier needs. With the data extracted, teams can monitor what matters most to assuring subscriber experience.
• OTT and gaming experience monitoring: Ensures high-quality streaming and gaming experiences through user plane analytics.
• 4G fallback monitoring: Being aware of coverage gaps that force a subscriber to change over to 4G LTE coverage is essential to improving network coverage and performance to maximize user experience. Leveraging NETSCOUT solutions aids in root-cause analysis to understand why this occurs and remedy it in the future.

Real-time performance monitoring

5G's promise of ultra-low latency, targeting as low as 1ms, demands real-time analytics and rapid response to performance degradation. Monitoring tools must handle vast amounts of data without becoming bottlenecks themselves, ensuring high throughput and bandwidth.

NETSCOUT solutions:

• Smart Data technology: NETSCOUT’s 3GPP-compliant Smart Data model enables real-time, artificial intelligence (AI)-ready insights for latency, throughput, and reliability metrics
• Automated observability: Supports proactive service assurance through automated workflows and AI/machine learning (ML)-driven analytics

Fixed Wireless Access

Fixed wireless access (FWA) is a key application of 5G technology, providing high-speed internet to a fixed location, such as a home or office, via the 5G network instead of traditional wireless connections such as fiber, DSL, or cable.

NETSCOUT solutions:

• Handset analysis: NETSCOUT solutions enable carriers to have device-level insights, allowing them to monitor the performance of equipment to troubleshoot performance degradations.
• Signal quality and stability: The radio signals that power FWA can be negatively impacted by weather, physical obstructions, and interference. Comprehensive visibility can assist in identifying these issues and helping customers troubleshoot problems.
• Application insights: With NETSCOUT, carriers can identify whether performance issues stem from the network or a specific application. Streaming platforms, gaming, and other connected applications can be monitored to determine if they are the cause of degradations, allowing customers to troubleshoot at the right place.

Security and Privacy

Encrypted traffic and dynamic threat landscape

The encryption of traffic in 5G networks complicates deep packet inspection, limiting visibility into application-level performance. Additionally, the dynamic threat landscape requires monitoring systems to detect anomalies and potential security breaches in real time.

NETSCOUT solutions:

• Two-sided security for FWA: Enhances visibility into both mobile networks and customer local area networks (LANs) to detect malicious traffic
• Zero-trust frameworks: Integrated into carriers’ monitoring strategy to protect edge and core infrastructure

AI/ML Integration

Data quality and volume

AI-driven monitoring requires high-quality, labeled data, which can be challenging to obtain at scale. Ensuring model accuracy and interpretability is crucial to providing actionable insights without false positives.

NETSCOUT solutions:

• Unparalleled data for AIOps platforms: Omnis AI Sensor collects packet-level insights to improve the data that feeds AIOps solutions. Paired with Omnis AI Streamer, this data is seamlessly sent to AIOps solutions to enable better outputs from AI models.
• Smart analytics chains: Combine domain expertise with AI/ML to automate workflows and detect anomalies.
• Networks Data Analytics Function (NWDAF) support: Enables real-time insights into complex sessions using end-to-end session analysis, feeding data into AI/ML frameworks.

Granular Insights

Subscriber, cell, and handset-level details

The details of how subscribers and devices traverse the network are imperative to providing optimal user experience. This detailed packet-level insight improves troubleshooting and expedites the resolution of performance degradations, leading to improved service continuity. It can also create revenue-generation opportunities via upgrades to service and technology.

NETSCOUT solutions:

• Subscriber-level insights: Determine which customer connections are the cause of issues on the network, allowing carriers to pinpoint troubleshooting efforts and improve subscriber experience.
• Cell-level visibility: As user traffic is handed off from one cell to another, NETSCOUT solutions enable detailed visibility into the performance of the transitions. With advanced radio access network (RAN) monitoring solutions, this critical process can be improved to maintain service continuity.
• Handset-level data: Outdated devices, such as those that are not 5G-compatible, can cause customers to become dissatisfied with their services. With device-level insights, carriers can identify these devices and work to upgrade customers to newer 5G-ready handsets to provide the best experience.

Edge Computing and Distributed Architecture

Decentralized infrastructure

As computing shifts to the edge, performance monitoring must extend beyond centralized data centers. Ensuring end-to-end visibility across edge nodes, core networks, and cloud services presents significant challenges.

NETSCOUT solutions:

• TrueCall geoanalytics: Offers geolocation-based insights to identify coverage gaps and optimize edge performance
• Support for multi-access edge computing (MEC) and private 5G: NETSCOUT tools extend visibility to edge computing environments and private 5G deployments

Network Slicing

Custom SLAs per slice

Network slicing allows for the creation of virtual networks tailored to specific use cases, each with unique performance requirements. This necessitates granular monitoring to ensure that slices do not interfere with each other while maintaining performance.

NETSCOUT solutions:

• Slice-level analytics: Provides visibility and service-level agreement (SLA) management per slice, enabling proactive monitoring and performance optimization for each use case

The Need for a Comprehensive, Scalable 5G Monitoring Solution

The challenges of managing 5G networks are multifaceted, encompassing network complexity, real-time performance, edge computing, network slicing, security, AI/ML integration, and customer experience. By leveraging advanced, scalable tools and technologies, such as those offered by NETSCOUT, service providers can navigate these challenges effectively, ensuring robust, reliable, and secure 5G network operations. As 5G continues to evolve, ongoing innovation and adaptation in monitoring strategies will be essential to fully realize the potential of this transformative technology.

Learn more about NETSCOUT’s 5G monitoring solutions.