Mobile traffic growth is exploding in response to the worldwide uptake in smartphone sales. At the same time new types of smartphone applications, cloud computing, and machine to machine (M2M) communications are making mobile traffic more volatile and changing traffic-flow patterns. Control plane capacity that scales up and down rapidly (elastic capacity) is needed to efficiently handle this massive and mercurial traffic growth.

Juniper Networks virtual Mobile Control Gateway (vMCG) is the SGSN/MME function hosted on a virtualized platform. It delivers elastic capacity by employing an MX 3D router that provides a single point of management, virtualization through the JunosV App Engine, and low technology costs using Virtual Services Engines (VSE), Juniper’s industry standard x86-based blade servers.

ACG Research compared the total cost of ownership (TCO), deployment/install time and cost for a standalone appliance-based solution with the vMCG solution for an actual mobile operator’s network that supports 10 million active subscribers. The comparison showed that the virtual solution has 54 percent lower TCO over five years and that the time to deploy the initial implementation is 46 percent faster than for the standalone appliance-based solution. The study also showed that the vMCG solution compared to the standalone appliance-based solution provides incremental capacity additions in 87 percent less time and at 92 percent less cost.

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