Secure and efficient validation of data traffic flows in fixed and mobile networks

Services residing within the application layer in today's fixed and mobile Next-Generation-Networks (NGN) environments are abstracting from the underlying network layer and therefore assuming pure IP connectivity without taking in-network services as Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees, routing decisions, etc. into consideration. Real-time services (security or multimedia) require reliable end-to-end (E2E) transport of packet data flows starting at the device going over fixed and mobile access and core networks into autonomous networks towards a specific service. End-to-end monitoring provides QoS information on the full data path, but analyzing all or most parts of one packet data flow through fragmented heterogeneous network domains is more complex and requires distributed monitoring techniques in each network compartment. This paper presents an efficient packet tracking algorithm using distributed hash based sampling technique. First the concept of packet tracking is presented followed by an overview of a prototype implementation. The paper concludes with a validation scenario of packet tracking applied on the 3GPP Evolved Packet Core exemplarily.