EXFO IMS Probe 1.1

"Neptune vProbe is a high capacity IP intelligent passive probing agent proposed by EXFO to bring customer and service visibility to mobile network operators.

Quality of Experience still a key challenge to retain mobile network customers. Neptune vProbe generates key business intelligence for multiple applications used by various teams: Network Operation, Service Operation, Optimization, Customer Care, Marketing and Management. These teams value data richness generated by Neptune vProbe to perform QoS and QoE monitoring, end-to-end troubleshooting, fault management and multi-dimensional analysis.

Neptune vProbe covers 5G, 4G, 3G and 2G network technologies.

Actual signaling (control plane) messages exchanged between network elements on 3GPP interfaces across the network are captured and processed by Neptune vProbe to generate Call Detail Records (CDR) summarizing each procedure on each interface for each subscriber. Related raw signaling frames are also stored for in-depth troubleshooting (end-to-end ladder diagram and protocol decoding).

Valuable information generation relies on unique capabilities of procedure and subscriber context handling to allow CDR enrichment with permanent identities as IMSI and IMEI as well as automated deciphering of Non-Access Stratum (NAS) protocol layers.

Neptune vProbe can be easily instantiated in NFV environments as a Virtual Network Function orchestrated by the VNF Manager thanks to VNF Descriptors in TOSCA format including resource description (Heat)​ and Life Cycle description (Ansible and Mistral scripts). Neptune vProbe brings versatile options when it comes to capture data flow including east-west traffic by supporting packet acceleration technologies (DPDK and SRIOV) and different tunnel technologies (GRE, VLAN …)"

*Information provided by EXFO