Ciena – vBNG

Paul Norkus

Ciena – vBNG

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The vBNG, a cloud-native solution, enables scalable, reliable broadband services with CUPS architecture, enhancing agility, management, and flexibility.

Ciena’s virtual Broadband Network Gateway (vBNG) is transforming the network edge with its ability to deliver network functions in software through its cloud-native, fully-virtualized architecture. It provides operators with the agility, reliability, and scalability required to deliver high-value broadband services to residential and enterprise customers.

The vBNG establishes and manages subscriber sessions by acting as the authentication point through which subscribers connect to a carrier’s broadband network. It aggregates subscriber traffic from the access network and handles several important subscriber management functions, including authentication, authorization and accounting, IP address assignment, Quality of Service (QoS), and policy management.

The vBNG also terminates various access types including fixed wireline, fixed wireless, public Wi-Fi, and hybrid access. The broadband services that vBNG supports include VoIP, IPTV multicast, OTT video streaming, video game streaming, business VPN services, and many other IP services.

The vBNG solution uniquely separates the subscriber management Control Plane (CP) and User Plane (UP). The CUPS model enables user planes from a single BNG system to be distributed anywhere in the network and elastically scale to meet application performance requirements and diverse and changing traffic needs. The CUPS architecture creates the opportunity to simplify operations by maintaining a single management interface on the CP to manage all UPs and provides the chance of interoperable multi-vendor architecture. The control plane carries information necessary to establish and control subscriber management. The user plane controls subscriber traffic.