VIAVI NITRO Core Mobile Network Service Assurance and Analytics Platform

NITRO Core by VIAVI is an analytics and assurance portfolio for mobile service providers. It takes a subscriber-centric approach and provides service-focused, proactive and unified workflows that deliver correlated, application-aware insights across 2G, 3G, 4G (LTE), 5G, VoLTE/IMS and VoNR networks.

Central Nodes

The NITRO Core Application Node manages system topology and configuration and hosts the application software and web server that deliver web-based applications to multiple users. KPI data is retrieved from the KPI Database Cluster and presented in the user interface for monitoring and analysis. The KPI Database Nodes are deployed as a cluster of at least three nodes for redundancy and high availability. They store real-time and historical KPI data, which is rolled up automatically from minute-level granularity to hourly and then daily tables.

Traffic Storage Agent (TSA)

The TSA is a data access agent that passively monitors control-plane and user-plane IP traffic and TDM to generate network, service and customer KPIs (SMARTmetrics). It writes control-plane traffic frames to disk and indexes them in real time by IMSI, IMEI and MSISDN. Traffic for specific end-user sessions or calls can then be retrieved on demand for transaction-tracing applications such as the NITRO Core Session Trace app, so not all captured traffic has to be processed continuously.

Traffic Analysis Agent (TAA)

The TAA generates control-plane/user-plane KPIs and SMARTmetrics feeds without storing packets or records. VIAVI recommends the TSA instead when traffic storage is required. Both agents classify end-user services and applications with a DPI engine that covers more than 5,000 applications, and they enrich user-plane records with service, APN/5G slice, handset, location and subscriber information. Feeds can also be sent at timed intervals to third-party applications or a data lake, with the content tailored to what the receiving application needs.