To deliver innovative new digitally-driven shopping experiences that enhance the convenience and safety of travelers, Unifree Duty Free, the operator of the world’s largest duty free zone, has implemented state-of-the-art retail technologies at the New Istanbul Airport. These solutions – which rely on a cutting-edge network infrastructure from Swiss structured cabling specialist R&M – include three-dimensional holograms, enhanced digital signage systems, and touch-free digital shopping technologies.

Offering an example of how its technology innovations strongly position Istanbul Grand Airport to ensure the safety and well-being of the ninety million travelers expected to visit the Duty Free zone annually, Osman Ayhan, Director of Information Technology at Unifree Duty Free said, “Enhanced digital signage systems give customers the opportunity to virtually try on luxury watches, jewelry and suits before they decide whether to buy or not.” This touch-free experience will be especially important to travelers in the post-COVID world.

Global events at the start of 2020, have resulted in a spike in digital payments with the total transaction value in the digital payments segment projected to reach $4.4. trillion this year. As retailers see a surge in digital and contact-less payments, the high-performance network from R&M will enable retailers are the Duty Free zone to offer these options in a reliable and highly secure manner. Other systems that are vital to smooth operations and traveler safety such as office workstations, Voice-over-IP telephones, and security systems are also connected to the R&M cabling network.

Mr. Ayhan explained that the decision to partner with R&M was based on a highly-positive recommendation from the airport’s IT department which has itself utilized 5,400 km of copper cablings and 3,270 km of fiber-optic cabling from R&M for connectivity of critical airport IT systems. “R&M is characterized by its quality, innovation, fast delivery times, expertise, flexibility and modular products. We also see the team spirit at R&M, the back-office support and the special training of installers on-site as a distinct advantage,” he said.

“We are extremely proud to expand R&M’s footprint at the world’s largest airport. Unifree has demonstrated a commitment to pioneering the new digital shopping experiences that will be essential to travelers in the coming months and years. The technologies we have provided serve as a reliable platform on which the company can continue to innovate with confidence in the performance, security and reliability of the underlying systems,” said Nabil Khalil, Executive Vice-President of R&M Middle East, Turkey and Africa.

Located at the heart of the terminal of Istanbul Grand Airport (IGA), the Duty Free zone offers state-of-the-art shopping. The sales area run by Unifree covers 56,000 square meters. Since the airport was opened in 2018, 54 brand, concept and flagship stores have moved in. A further 102 sub-operators, exclusive boutiques and a bazaar with local products rounded out the offer.

By: Hesham Elsherif, Principal System Engineer at A10 Networks

Today’s LTE and 4G networks have been playing an important role in supporting mobile broadband services (e.g., video conferencing, high-definition content streaming, etc.) across millions of smart devices, such as smartphones, laptops, tablets and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The number of connected devices is on the rise, growing 15 percent or more year-over-year and projected to be 28.5 billion devices by 2022 according to Cisco VNI forecast.

Mobile service providers have been challenged to support such a high growth of connected devices and their corresponding increases in network traffic. Adding networking nodes to scale-out capacity is a relatively easy change. Meanwhile, it’s essential for service providers to keep offering innovative value-added services to differentiate service experience and monetise new services. These services including parental control, URL filtering, content protection and endpoint device protection from malware and ID theft, to name a few.

Service providers, however, are now facing new challenges of operational complexity and extra network latency coming from those services. Such challenges will become even more significant when it comes to 5G, as this will drive even more rapid proliferation of mobile and the IoT devices. It will be critical to minimise latency to ensure there are no interruptions to emerging mission-critical services that are expected to dramatically increase with 5G networks.

Gi-LAN Network Overview

In a mobile network, there are two segments between the radio network and the Internet: the evolved packet core (EPC) and the Gi/SGi-LAN. The EPC is a packet-based mobile core running both voice and data on 4G/ LTE networks. The Gi-LAN is the network where service providers typically provide various homegrown and value-added services using unique capabilities through a combination of IP-based service functions, such as firewall, carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), deep packet inspection (DPI), policy control, traffic and content optimisation. And these services are generally provided by a wide variety of vendors. Service providers need to steer the traffic and direct it to specific service functions, which may be chained, only when necessary, in order to meet specific policy enforcement and service-level agreements for each subscriber.

The Gi-LAN network is an essential segment that enables enhanced security and value-added service offerings to differentiate and monetise services. Therefore, it’s crucial to have an efficient Gi-LAN architecture to deliver a high-quality service experience.

Challenges in Gi-LAN Segment

In the today’s 4G/ LTE world, a typical mobile service provider has an ADC, a DPI, a CGNAT and a firewall device as part of Gi-LAN service components. They are mainly deployed as independent network functions on dedicated physical devices from a wide range of vendors. This makes Gi-LAN complex and inflexible from operational and management perspective. Thus, this type of architecture, as known as monolithic architecture, is reaching its limits and does not scale to meet the needs of the rising data traffic in 4G and 4G+ architectures. This will continue to be an issue in 5G infrastructure deployments. The two most serious issues are:

1. Increased latency
2. Significantly higher total cost of ownership

Latency is becoming a significant concern since lower latency is required by online gaming and video streaming services even today. With the transition to 5G, ultra-reliable low-latency connectivity targets latencies of less than 1ms for use cases, such as real-time interactive AR/ VR, tactile Internet, industrial automation, mission/life-critical service like remote surgery, self-driving cars and many more. The architecture with individual service functions on different hardware has a major impact on this promise of lower latency. Multiple service functions are usually chained and every hop the data packet traversing between service functions adds additional latency, causing overall service degradation.

The management overhead of each solution independently is also a burden. The network operator must invest in monitoring, management and deployment services for all devices from various vendors individually, resulting in large operational expenses.

Solution – Consolidating Service Functions in Gi-LAN

In order to overcome these issues, there are a few approaches you can take. From architecture perspective, Service-Based Architecture (SBA) or microservices architecture will address operational concerns since leveraging such architecture leads to higher flexibility and automation and significant cost reduction. However, it less likely addresses the network latency concern because each service function, regardless of VNF or microservice, still contributes in the overall latency as far as they are deployed as individual VM or microservice.

So, what if multiple service functions are consolidated into one instance? For example, CGNAT and Gi firewall are fundamental components in the mobile network, and some subscribers may choose to use additional services such as DPI, URL filtering. Such consolidation is feasible only if the product/ solution supports flexible traffic steering and service chaining capabilities along with those service functions. By consolidating Gi-LAN service functions into one instance/ appliance, it helps drastically reduce the extra latency and simplify network design and operation. Such concepts are not new but there aren’t many vendors who can provide consolidated Gi-LAN service functions at scale.

Therefore, when building an efficient Gi-LAN network, service providers need to consider a solution that can offer:

• Multiple network and service functions on a single instance/ appliance
• Flexible service chaining support
• Subscriber awareness and DPI capability supported for granular traffic steering
• Variety of form-factor options – physical (PNF) and virtual (VNF) appliances
• High performance and capacity with scale-out capability
• Easy integration and transition to SDN/NFV deployment