RUCKUS Virtual SmartCell Gateway
NFV-based WLAN Controller Designed for Service Providers and Enterprises

Features:

Figure 1 shows how the vSCG would be deployed in an actual network. All control plane traffic flows between the RUCKUS access points and the vSCG in the cloud. All data plane traffic is routed directly from the RUCKUS access points to a WLAN gateway, without passing through the vSCG. This greatly simplifies network design as it allows the WLAN Controller function to be consolidated in a national data center, while the WLAN gateway function can reside in regional data center. This approach allows user data to be quickly routed via the most expeditious path to the Internet. RUCKUS supports L2oGRE (aka Soft GRE) for this data tunneling function. Soft GRE is supported by most WLAN gateways. The RADIUS Proxy function on the vSCG can greatly reduce the RADIUS traffic load on the WLAN gateways.

Highly Scalable and Fully Featured WLAN Controller

The vSCG has the scale and the feature set for the most demanding service provider applications. It has been designed with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in mind, a central tenant of which is the decoupling of the application from the underlying hardware. By splitting out the WLAN control plane from the data plane, and then virtualizing the WLAN Controller application, the stage is set for an extremely versatile network deployment that is consistent with emerging industry trends (See figure 1). T

he vSCG WLAN Controller function provides feature-rich access point management, including control over their self-organizing smart networking behaviors such as RF management, load balancing, adaptive meshing, and backhaul optimization.

The following are some of the capabilities that are enabled by the vSCG WLAN Controller function.

WLAN radio resource management

The vSCG supports a variety of radio resource management techniques of which the most important is ChannelFly™. This algorithm allows APs to automatically select the optimum 2.4 and 5 GHz channels so as to maximize performance and minimize interference. When properly deployed, ChannelFly can double the capacity of a WLAN network in a high-density environment. The vSCG also manages dynamic mesh deployments that make use of the 5 GHz band to backhaul AP traffic to a point where wireline facilities are available. Mesh backhaul configurations can be dynamically reconfigured to reroute traffic over different paths as conditions change.

Seamless low-latency WLAN handoffs

The vSCG supports seamless handoff for subscribers as they move from one Wi-Fi AP to another in the coverage area. It is not necessary for the user to re-authenticate as they move about. Their credentials are passed from access point to access point. Handoffs are performed rapidly, and there is no impact on the application. The vSCG also supports Wi-Fi RAN load balancing.

Hotspot 2.0 based roaming

Hotspot 2.0 enables seamless network discovery and selection along with seamless authentication using 802.1x/EAP. It represents the future of Wi-Fi roaming and has picked up a tremendous amount of support from throughout the wireless industry. The vSCG supports Hotspot 2.0 by enabling RUCKUS APs to exchange information with Wi-Fi devices pre-association. The information that is exchanged includes details on roaming consortiums that are supportted by that AP as well as information on backhaul capacity and loading. The Wi-Fi device then selects the best available AP and begins the authentication process. Hotspot 2.0 is automatic and requires no user intervention.

Figure 2: The built-in EMS in the vSCG provides user-friendly fullfledged FCAPS support and can be easily integrated with existing OSS/BSS systems.

Operations and Administration (OAM)

Element management system

With the built-in EMS, the vSCG supports rapid deployment and eliminates the need for separate and expensive management systems. The built-in EMS provides user-friendly full-fledged FCAPS support and can be easily integrated with existing OSS/ BSS systems via a variety of interfaces ranging from traditional SNMP or CLI based interfaces to web programming friendly secure API based methods (RESTful JSON). See Figure 2.

Statistics, KPIs and reports

The vSCG's built-in EMS provides rich near real-time statistics on subscribers (including client fingerprinting), APs, SSIDs, mesh backhaul, and the vSCG cluster itself. Reports ranging from hours to years can be generated for a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) and exported out in multiple formats. For operators seeking richer information reporting, RUCKUS also provides the SmartCell Insight (SCI) appliance for long-term storage, sophisticated data mining and analysis, and richer more complex reporting.

Access point configuration and management

Access point configuration is a key function of the vSCG and especially important when rolling out networks with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of access points. In a RUCKUS network deployment, access points will automatically connect to a pre-determined vSCG instance when they are installed in the field. They will identify themselves via MAC address and serial number, and then their configuration will be automatically downloaded along with their zone number. The configuration information for each AP is downloaded to the vSCG from an external provisioning system via a CSV file or an API (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Automatic Access Point Configuration is the process by which APs installed in the field can have their configuration automatically downloaded to them via the vSCG.

Figure 4: The vSCG runs on a virtual machine established by the hypervisor. It in-turn runs atop the physical x86 blade servers. When deploying the vSCG in a data center, the existing cloud service management and orchestration function can interface with the vSCG through an API. This enablethe rapid deployment of large numbers on managed WLAN networks in an extremely cost effective manner.

Managed Services

The vSCG's fully functional GUI provides concurrent role-based access control (RBAC) for viewing the Wi-Fi system resources and performance. With the support of partitioning for access in a secure manner, the vSCG allows service providers to give their managed services customers the ability to administer and monitor only the SSIDs over which they have control.

Virtualizing the SCG

This is a key capability that will accelerate the deployment of managed WLAN services. It involves running the vSCG application and its OS on top of either the KVM or the VMware vSphere hypervisor. Virtualization enables a whole host of new capabilities including:

• Ability to dynamically add hardware resources as required to support the needs of a specific managed services customer, and those resources can be released just as easily. This enables a much more efficient use of data center resources.
• High availability by enabling the hypervisor to shift applications to different server modules to address failures. The vSCG application can also run in Active/Active mode for extremely high availability.
• The vSCG is well suited to deployment in a service provider's data center and it can support usage-based charging models
• Managed services customers can be assigned their own VM or they can share a VM in a multi-tenant environment as circumstances dictate. The latter is an extremely cost effective way of virtualizing the SCG function.

Key vSCG features
Monitoring	Enables quick views of the health of the network, APs, connected devices, and alerts Provides detailed views of the AP status and client data
Remote troubleshooting	Speeds problem resolution across multiple sites with easy drill-down menus Enables IT to perform troubleshooting commands from the cloud
Simplified deployment	Accelerates large-scale deployments by configuring APs in groups. Simplifies configuration by applying consistent configurations and firmware to a group of APs Offers flexible one-click firmware upgrades for all APs or a group of APs, using a cloud-hosted firmware server
Reporting	Creates scheduled or on-demand network and security reports Delivers PCI-compliance reports for compliance
One-click provisioning	Downloads AP configurations from the cloud automatically Requires no local IT support; any person onsite can plug in and power up the APs

Specifications:

Virtual SmartCell Gateway Specifications
Supported Configurations
Managed APs	Up to 10,000 per vSCG Up to 30,000 in a 3 +1 cluster
Concurrent Mobiles (UEs) / Stations	Up to 100,000 users per vSCG instance Up to 300,000 users per vSCG cluster
WLANs	6,144 per vSCG
Controller Expansion	Up to 4 controllers in a 3+1 active mode, supporting non-disruptive capacity expansion. Future releases will validate larger clusters.
Controller Redundancy	Distributed data preserving with 3+1 redundancy
Key Functionality
Data Offload	Local offload of traffic from the AP directly to the internet or tunneled to a WLAN gateway
Authentication Protocols	Open, 802.1x/EAP, PSK, WISPr, WPA, WPA2-AES, WPA-TKIP, WEP Fast EAP-SIM re-authentication EAP-SIM, EAP-AKA, EAP-AKA' over WLAN for 802.1x Wi-Fi Locations with the SCG AAA-Proxy functionality enabled
AAA Service	RADIUS (AAA) PROXY
Hotspot 2.0	Support for Hotspot 2.0 release 1
WISPr Support	WISPr 1.0 authentication
Element Management	Secure multi-operator login (RBAC) Large scale (bulk) AP management tools Configuration audit trails Alarm and event notification (SNMP V2 / V3) Extensive statistics and reporting Integrated on-board remote accessible EMS RESTful APIs (JSON) CLI

Documentation:

Download the RUCKUS Virtual SmartCell Gateway Datasheet (PDF).