Procera enables broadband service providers to implement Carrier Grade NAT (CGN) using market-proven intelligent policy enforcement solutions.

Broadband Carrier Grade NAT

With the explosion in broadband access via multiple devices, the impending exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and the delay of IPv6, broadband operators are turning to Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (Carrier Grade NAT or CGN) to ease their address shortages. However, existing CGN solutions lack subscriber and service plan awareness, and most are not designed to scale with transparent stateful processing of application traffic.

How can broadband network operators implement CGN without compromising subscriber visibility, performance or scalability? They need solutions that enable them to:

• Maintain awareness of subscribers and service plans without massive logging requirements
• Scale with transparent stateful processing of application traffic, including asymmetric traffic
• Maintain network analytics capabilities despite the aggregation of subscribers into a single address space

The Procera Solution

Procera enables broadband operators to implement CGN with real-time Intelligent Policy Enforcement (IPE) solutions that provide three key use cases:

• Awareness of subscribers, service plans, applications, devices, and more. Our IPE system is the first CGN solution to provide this awareness, enabling intelligent charging and policy enforcement, even with NAT.
• Stateful Processing. Because our solution is application aware and stateful, the NAT process simply adds a re-write action on top of the existing stateful processing and re-write capabilities of our IPE system to meet carrier-scale requirements for session setup as well as total sessions. Our FlowSync™ system enables full support for asymmetric traffic.
• Flexibility to be deployed in a variety of network environments—close to the subscriber or in a centralized deployment—without compromising awareness or carrier-scale performance. Our IPE solution also provides comprehensive subscriber and business analytics to help improve network planning and management.

Learn more about our PacketLogic Intelligent Policy Enforcement (IPE) solutions.