LoadCore™ - 4G/5G Core Network Test Solution

5G deployments will enable enhanced mobile broadband services with higher data rates, increased capacity, and lower latencies. New business opportunities and increased revenue sources can be found with Network Slicing, Mobile Edge Computing and Private 5G via massive and critical IoT services in sectors like automotive, manufacturing, energy and utilities.

But to ensure the carrier-grade quality required to carry this amount of wireless traffic, service providers need to characterize and continuously validate their 5G Core (5GC) network in the lab and pre-production deployments. This requires extensive testing of 5G SA (Standalone) elements in the Core network.

Challenges include:

• Implementing virtualization technologies and cloud-optimized network functions

• Validating emerging architectures and standards: handling simultaneous protocol requests for tunneling-, session-, or HTTP2-based signaling

Pre-Deployment Validation Using Real-World Subscriber Simulation

Keysight's 5G LoadCore™ test solution addresses critical validation requirements for improved reliability and performance of 5G emerging architectures. With comprehensive performance testing of all nodes and interfaces, this powerful yet easy-to-use solution helps network operators deliver higher-performing services, greater scale, and lower-latency communications.

Using real-world subscriber modeling, testers do not need to be protocol experts to develop realistic test scenarios. From a single application, perform capacity tests, detail a device’s throughput, measure voice and video quality, and model a wide variety of mobility scenarios. 

With 5G development and adoption progressing rapidly, cloud native is central to the 5GC architecture. With its microservice architecture and options to be deployed either as a virtual machine (VM) or Container, LoadCore is fully aligned to this new paradigm.

Highlights

• Test the 4G/5G Core Network by simulating multiple nodes and interfaces, from end-toend to node isolation.

• Simulate UE behavior in multiple 4G/5G use cases: network slicing, multi-access edge computing (MEC) low latency and offloading, video optimization.

• Scale up to millions of subscribers with high data throughput, using stateful application traffic mixes that can interact with real servers and peers.

• Perform service quality validation with subscriber modeling, multiplay traffic, and quality of experience (QoE) measurements.

• Validate complex scenarios for service-based architecture (SBA)

• Control test traffic mix and intensity using network objectives to independently manage control and user planes.

• Deploy either as VM or containers on private, hybrid or public clouds. High flexibility in terms of supported platform, hypervisor and orchestration.

• Available through AWS Marketplace either as BYOL (Bring Your Own License) or PAYG (Pay As You Go).

• Full automation via REST API and Python allows users to create regressions for continuous validation of product quality.

• Predefined test suites for 3GPP 5G Security Assurance Specification (SCAS) conformance validation.

• Fuzzing testing capability on SBI interfaces.

5G Core Network Validation

LoadCore is a comprehensive solution for the complete validation of the 5G Core Network. From end-toend to node isolation, LoadCore simultaneously simulates multiple nodes and interfaces, allowing the recreation of entire networks in lab environment by using a topology-based user interface (web UI).

The entire core is simulated, with each node independently deployed. User equipment (UE) actions (Registration/PDU Session Establishment/Modification, Handovers, etc.) are simulated across all 5G core nodes and interfaces, offering a complete end-to-end view. 4G, 5G NSA (non-standalone) and 4G/5G iRAT procedures can also be simulated for complete validation across multiple domains.