Network visibility and traffic analysis for mobile operators
Mobile networks carry enormous volumes of traffic across complex infrastructures, from the radio access network and mobile core to the Internet and private services. Understanding what is happening across this traffic is essential for maintaining service quality, troubleshooting network issues, planning capacity, and detecting abnormal behavior.
ntop provides high-performance traffic visibility for mobile operators, with deep application and protocol identification and support for monitoring mobile-specific protocols such as GTP.
Monitor mobile traffic from the core to the Internet
Mobile operators need visibility beyond traditional interface and link statistics. Traffic must be understood in terms of subscribers, applications, protocols, endpoints, and network services.
ntop solutions provide detailed traffic analysis that can help operators answer questions such as:
- How much traffic is being carried by each mobile service or network segment?
- Which applications are consuming the available capacity?
- Which subscribers, devices, or services are generating the most traffic?
- How is traffic distributed across different network elements?
- Are unexpected protocols or applications present in the mobile network?
- Where are congestion and performance problems occurring?
- How does traffic behavior change over time?
Deep Packet Inspection through nDPI provides application-level visibility across hundreds of Layer-7 protocols, while ntopng provides real-time dashboards, historical analysis, alerts, and detailed traffic views.
GTP traffic visibility
GTP is fundamental to mobile packet networks, carrying subscriber traffic between different elements of the mobile core.
Monitoring GTP traffic can provide valuable visibility into the behavior of mobile networks without requiring operators to rely exclusively on device-specific counters.
ntop software can analyze GTP traffic and expose traffic characteristics that are useful for operations and capacity planning, including:
- GTP tunnel activity
- Traffic volumes and rates
- Mobile network endpoints
- Subscriber-related traffic information where available from the monitored traffic
- Application and protocol breakdown inside mobile traffic
- Top talkers and destinations
- Traffic trends and historical behavior
This allows operators to move from simply monitoring links to understanding the traffic actually transported through the mobile network.
Application visibility
Mobile traffic is no longer dominated by a small number of predictable services. Video streaming, social networks, messaging, cloud applications, gaming, VPNs, software updates, and many other applications compete for network resources.
With nDPI-powered application identification, operators can understand traffic at the application level and identify which services are responsible for bandwidth consumption.
This information can be used for:
- Capacity planning
- Traffic engineering
- Service monitoring
- Troubleshooting
- Quality-of-experience analysis
- Network optimization
- Security investigations
Distributed monitoring
Mobile networks are inherently distributed. Monitoring may be required at multiple points, including mobile core interfaces, aggregation networks, Internet gateways, data centers, and peering points.
ntop software can be deployed close to the traffic sources and provide centralized visibility across distributed infrastructure. Flow-based monitoring can also complement packet-based monitoring where full packet inspection is not practical.
This architecture allows operators to scale monitoring according to the size and topology of the network.
Detect problems before subscribers do
Traffic anomalies can be an early indication of network problems, misconfiguration, attacks, or unexpected changes in subscriber behavior.
ntopng provides traffic monitoring and alerting capabilities that help network teams identify unusual traffic patterns and investigate their causes.
Examples include:
- Unexpected traffic spikes
- Sudden changes in application usage
- Abnormal traffic from specific hosts or network segments
- Excessive bandwidth consumption
- Unusual protocol activity
- Connectivity and performance degradation
From traffic visibility to network intelligence
For mobile operators, traffic monitoring is not just about knowing how many gigabits are flowing through an interface. The goal is to understand what the network is carrying, who is generating the traffic, which applications are involved, and how traffic behavior changes over time.
The ntop platform combines high-performance traffic collection, deep packet inspection, flow analysis, real-time monitoring, historical visibility, and alerting to provide a complete view of mobile network traffic.
Typical deployment
A typical deployment can monitor traffic at mobile core interfaces and Internet-facing links, with ntop probes collecting traffic and ntopng providing centralized analysis and visualization.
Mobile traffic → GTP / IP traffic → nProbe → ntopng → Traffic visibility, QoE, troubleshooting and capacity planning
Key benefits
- GTP visibility — Monitor traffic transported through mobile packet networks.
- Deep application identification — Identify hundreds of Layer-7 protocols using nDPI.
- Subscriber and host visibility — Investigate traffic at the level relevant to network operations.
- Real-time monitoring — Understand what is happening now.
- Historical analysis — Compare traffic patterns and identify trends.
- Distributed deployment — Monitor multiple network locations from a central platform.
- Capacity planning — Understand where and when network resources are being consumed.
- Troubleshooting — Quickly identify traffic patterns associated with performance problems.
- Security visibility — Detect unexpected or abnormal traffic behavior.
Built for high-performance networks
ntop software is designed for high-speed traffic monitoring and can be deployed across carrier-grade network infrastructures. Its modular architecture allows operators to combine packet capture, flow collection, deep packet inspection, and traffic analysis according to their monitoring requirements.