A SONiC-based Open Packet Broker for 5G Monitoring

Author: David Ahl, AI Networking Solutions and Ecosystem, NVIDIA; Chidambaram (Chid), CTO, Aviz Networks Collection: 2023 Global Summit - Networking

Summary

NVIDIA and Aviz Networks present a SONiC-based Open Packet Broker (OPB) for 5G telco monitoring and enterprise security use cases. The core argument is that SONiC -- specifically the 100% open-source community version -- provides an ideal platform for building packet brokering solutions because its microservices architecture, SAI abstraction layer, and existing infrastructure services eliminate the need to build management and NOS foundations from scratch. Combined with NVIDIA Spectrum switch families (Spectrum 1 through 4), the flexible ASIC pipeline enables advanced functions like GTP parsing for 5G, packet tagging and replication, and user-defined offset-based deep packet inspection at wire speed up to 400G.

The solution has been deployed at a major telco customer, sitting between signaling gateways and packet gateways in the GPRS core network. It filters GTP-C and GTP-U traffic by outer IP, inner IP version, and Tunnel Endpoint Identifier (TEID), performs symmetric load balancing to analytics tools, and integrates with Zabbix for telemetry and FlowVision for GUI-based configuration. A second deployment at an enterprise security customer uses the OPB between network TAPs and firewalls for L2/L3 filtering, VLAN-based forwarding, and encrypted/decrypted traffic analysis. Aviz co-developed the solution with customers directly in their labs over one year, leveraging SONiC's ability to add custom microservices alongside the standard SyncD and Redis infrastructure. The solution was ported across Spectrum 1 through 3 platforms within two weeks.