Bridgewater releases performance benchmarks for 3G and LTE Control Planes

With all the worry about how operators will meet requirements for mobile data networks as they continue to grow, it will be imperative that operator control planes be scalable and capable of handling high transactions.

With that in mind, Bridgewater Systems boasted high transaction rates today, demonstrating how customer experience could be optimized for mobile subscribers getting on and engaging in data sessions. Bridgewater (TSX: BWC) performed benchmarks on its control plane solution in both 3G and long-term evolution (LTE) environments. Tested were the Bridgewater Home Subscriber Server (HSS), Policy Controller (PCRF) and the Cisco ASR 5000.

By bringing 1 million subscribers onto data sessions at once, under conditions representative of a data-centric Tier 1 service provider network, the test revealed those users could be accessing the network at the same time (at a sustained rate of 18,000 packet data protocol activations per second). That equates to 1 million users activating data sessions in less than one minute.

Those and other results are summarized in a newly released white paper. In that paper, Section IV “Model Operator Requirements” covers 3G and LTE results for 50 million and 100 million subscribers, respectively. There were 11,200 transactions per second in a scenario with 100 million subscribers, demonstrating the PCRF to gateway GPRS support node transaction rate. In the test, a large proportion of the subscriber base is assumed to use data, with 10% to 15% of users attached during a busy hour, respectively. It is a scenario where many lower-end, prepaid, GPRS or simply occasional users, start to use data more often than they usually have.

In the LTE test, 1 million LTE devices coming onto the network within a short time was simulated. The Bridgewater HSS and PCRF successfully supported sustained rates of 5000 attachments per second.

The tests were conducted as part of the European Advanced Network Test Center tests -‑ the first publicly available, comprehensive performance tests of Cisco’s mobile packet core supported by Bridgewater’s control plane solutions.