Bridging The Gap Between Wired and Wireless Solutions
Access to seamless broadband services has become more than a convenience – it’s a fundamental requirement for communication, productivity, and economic growth. Nokia’s Multi-Access Gateway (MAG) is a comprehensive solution designed to converge wireline and fixed-wireless access technologies, enabling service providers to deliver affordable, reliable, and uninterrupted broadband experiences to users worldwide.
With reliable connectivity being a cornerstone of today’s ultra-connected society, addressing the diverse needs of users across homes, businesses, and communities presents a significant challenge for service providers. The Nokia MAG is a versatile platform capable of aggregating various access technologies, bridging the gap between traditional wireline and cutting-edge wireless solutions.
Originally conceived as a Broadband Network Gateway, the MAG has evolved into a dynamic solution that can adapt to the digital landscape’s evolving demands. From traditional xDSL and FTTx deployments to advanced 5G New Radio technology, the MAG offers a holistic approach to broadband delivery, ensuring that users can access high-speed connectivity regardless of location or infrastructure limitations.
Enhancing the Broadband Experience
Nokia’s 7750 Service Router (SR) family is at the core of the MAG. Powered by FP network processor technology and the robust Service Router Operating System (SR OS), the MAG enables ultra-scalable subscriber management, granular bandwidth control, and line-rate DDoS filtering, ensuring users’ seamless and uninterrupted broadband experience.
Scalable Platform Options
The Nokia MAG is engineered to adapt seamlessly to your evolving business and operational requirements. You can address specific service needs and optimize your business models economically with finely tailored software licensing options. Scaling up your configurations and incorporating additional network functionalities is effortless through software upgrades, complemented by a diverse array of 7750 SR platform choices.
From the entry-level Nokia 7750 SR-a and 7750 SR-e series to the cutting-edge 7750 SR and 7750 SR-s edge routing platforms powered by Nokia’s FP5 routing silicon, our supported hardware platforms cater to a wide spectrum of needs and performance expectations.
The inclusion of Nokia FP5 silicon ensures comprehensive scalability and future-proofing. Featuring a 6 Tb/s packet processor and fully buffered ingress and egress shaping, the FP5 silicon empowers you to deliver exceptional upstream and downstream throughput while maintaining granular per-subscriber and per-service Quality of Service (QoS) controls. With its innovative design, FP5 guarantees deterministic and reliable performance across all service combinations and usage scenarios without compromising quality or efficiency.
Proven Reliability
Backed by a track record of reliability and trust, the Nokia MAG capitalizes on advanced software design principles and the proven capabilities of the SR OS. Leveraging features like distributed symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), the MAG optimizes the utilization of multi-CPU architectures, while its native 64-bit OS enhances access to multicore memory, ensuring optimal performance.
Renowned as the most trusted and widely deployed implementation in the industry, the Nokia MAG has been successfully deployed in hundreds of scenarios. Its flexibility extends to system redundancy protocols, load-balancing mechanisms, and fail-over strategies, all of which contribute to maximizing system availability and ensuring service reliability at all times.
Nokia Multi-Access Gateway (MAG) Supports Key Gateway Functions
The Nokia Multi-Access Gateway is engineered to accommodate multiple wireline and fixed-wireless access technologies across various deployment models, facilitating multi-access convergence at a single edge. Additionally, it offers various value-added network functions to enhance the overall user experience. Gateway functions can be configured via software licenses, potentially requiring specific hardware support capabilities within the network.
Here’s an overview of some key gateway functions supported by the Nokia Multi-Access Gateway:
Broadband Network Gateway (BNG)
The BNG covers essential subscriber management functions for multiservice Ethernet-based broadband access aggregation, supporting technologies such as xDSL, FTTx, xPON, CMTS, and WiMAX as defined in TR-101 and TR-178. It facilitates IPoE and PPPoE session management with IPv4 and/or IPv6 address assignment. Home gateways can operate in bridged or routed mode, supporting static and dynamic host configurations. Authentication, authorization, and accounting of subscriber sessions can be conducted via RADIUS, DHCP, DIAMETER, or a local database. HQoS enables granular per-service and per-subscriber policy control of upstream and downstream traffic, managing available bandwidth for various services, including Internet access, IPTV/video, and voice services. Auto-sensing VLANs allow for dynamic subscriber service configuration, while call-trace features enable detailed debugging of subscriber sessions.
L2TP Network Server (LNS)
The LNS function facilitates broadband access wholesale, with the BNG of the access wholesaler serving as a Layer 2 Access Server to aggregate subscriber traffic in Layer 2 tunnels, which are then handed off to the LNS operated by the ISP. Supported tunneling protocols include PPPoL2TP and Multi-Link PPPoL2TP.
Trusted Wireless Access Gateway (TWAG)
The TWAG enables carrier Wi-Fi access as defined in BBF TR-291. It supports multiple access and tunneling options, including L2oGRE, L2TPv3, MPLS pseudowires, and L2GREoIPSec. The solution accommodates both Open SSID with authentication through a captive portal and Closed SSID through EAP-PEAP and EAP-SIM. Seamless inter-AP mobility across SSIDs is enabled by DHCP or SLAAC control triggers.
Fixed-Wireless Access Gateway (FWAG)
The gateway seamlessly integrates wireline and 3GPP fixed-wireless access, adding the SPGW (4G/5G NSA) and SMF/UPF (5G SA) functions. Wireline operators can deploy FWAG to enhance coverage in brownfield areas with last-mile access plant limitations and rapidly expand services in greenfield areas.
Network Service Functions
The MAG also offers a suite of value-added network functions and services that can be activated through Multiservice Integrated Service Adapters (ISAs) within the Nokia 7750 SR family platforms. Alternatively, these functions can be facilitated by External Service Adapters (ESAs) that can scale within the telco cloud, seamlessly integrating into the data path by selectively rerouting subscriber traffic from Nokia 7750 SR and 7750 SR-s BNG platforms.
Network Address Translation (NAT)
Carrier-grade Network Address Translation ensures the conservation of IPv4 addresses and sustains IPv4 internet access while transitioning to IPv6. Operators can implement L2-aware NAT as an integrated subscriber management solution, with options to transition to Large Scale NAT, Dual-Stack Lite, and NAT64. Deterministic NATP and various NAT logging options are available, leveraging RADIUS, syslog, and cflowd protocols.
DPI/Application Assurance (AA)
Utilizing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and other techniques, including 5-tuple header inspection and advanced behavioral analysis, Layer 4–7 application identification accurately detects encrypted or evasive applications. AA enables the application of QoS policy on aggregate traffic or a per-subscriber and per-application basis. It also generates reports on traffic volumes, application performance, and implemented policies. Additional AA functionalities encompass stateful firewalling, URL filtering (e.g., for parental guidance), and subscriber redirection to captive portals.
Video IPTV (VIDEO)
A comprehensive suite of IPTV support functions optimizes the performance and reliability of SD, HD, and UHD broadcast TV services, including:
- Fast Channel Change buffering service
- Retransmission of dropped multicast packets
- Video monitoring
- Video backhaul packet repair (Perfect Stream)
Virtualized Residential Gateway (VRGW)
The VRGW functionality, as outlined in BBF TR-317, establishes a bridged connection between home gateways on customer premises and a virtual gateway (vG) instance in the telco cloud. This model enables management visibility into individual user devices connected to the home LAN and facilitates per-device policy management. Extending the home LAN into the telco cloud introduces new avenues to manage and enrich the user experience, enabling direct connections to network-attached compute and storage resources such as game servers or PVRs.
Use Cases and Deployment Options
The MAG unlocks many use cases and deployment options, empowering service providers to maximize capacity, reach, and revenues across diverse access technologies and service offerings. Whether it’s extending wireline access through xPON deployments or leveraging fixed-wireless solutions such as 4G/LTE and 5G NSA, the MAG provides the flexibility and scalability needed to deliver fast, reliable, and ubiquitous broadband services.
Deployment options range from integrated setups on Nokia 7750 SR platforms to virtualized service routers and disaggregated models based on open interface standards. The latter, enabled by Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS), allows for flexible bandwidth optimization, latency management, and scalable control plane functions, ensuring optimal resource utilization and operational efficiency.
T-Mobile’s Collaboration with Nokia
Nokia has unveiled a strategic partnership with T-Mobile to introduce a dedicated gateway solution to accommodate LTE, 5G NSA, and 5G SA technologies, specifically tailored for the service provider’s nationwide fixed-wireless High-Speed Internet (HSI) traffic. This collaboration marks a significant step in enhancing T-Mobile’s service scalability and time-to-market capabilities.
Fixed wireless access (FWA) emerges as a pivotal technology in rapidly expanding high-speed broadband coverage, aiming to establish universal or ubiquitous broadband connectivity. FWA represents a crucial tool in supporting residential broadband applications, particularly high-definition video streaming, which demands substantially higher bandwidth than mobile applications.
T-Mobile’s adoption of the Nokia Multi-Access Gateway (MAG) solution signifies a strategic move toward delivering every customer’s affordable, reliable, and seamless broadband experience. The Nokia platform can incrementally scale the bandwidth for HSI traffic to multiple Terabits per second while maintaining significant power and space efficiency. As T-Mobile extends its HSI service to more households, it benefits from increased bandwidth and reduced space and power requirements.
Unveiling SR OS Release 23
Nokia continues to innovate and refine the MAG through SR OS Release 23, a high-performance, subscriber-centric solution that supports a wide range of wireline and fixed-wireless broadband services. With features such as Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) and a rich set of integrated service functions, SR OS Release 23 represents the culmination of Nokia’s commitment to excellence and innovation in broadband networking.
About Infinity Technology Solutions
Infinity Technology Solutions specializes in broadband and critical communications infrastructure development. We help our channel partners create and deploy private wireless, microwave backhaul, IP/MPLS, and optical networking technologies.
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