ASN details Enhanced User Session Identification for telecom session keys
ASN describes Enhanced User Session Identification, which extends standard Inner 5-Tuple session keys with selected tunnel and QoS fields to prevent different subscribers or services from being merged into one session. For enterprise IT and security teams, the update affects how session-scoped metadata and KPIs are generated and exported for analytics.
Research Overview
The blog explains that modern mobile networks carry packets for multiple services over shared infrastructure, producing large numbers of network flows. It argues that packet inspection alone is insufficient for analytics because systems must classify which packets belong to the same user session.
ASN’s approach focuses on synthesizing flows per user session and exporting session-level information such as metadata and performance KPIs through Kafka and IPFIX. The post frames accurate user session identification as a prerequisite for reliable subscriber analytics and network monitoring outputs.
Key Findings
The blog states that ASN traditionally uses the Inner 5-Tuple—inner source IP, inner destination IP, source port, destination port, and transport protocol—to identify sessions. It notes that this method can fail when different subscribers or services share the same Inner 5-Tuple on modern telecom networks.
When sessions are incorrectly merged, the blog lists outcomes including incorrect session aggregation, IMSI mis-correlation, inaccurate metadata exports, incorrect KPI calculations, and reduced visibility into individual services. It also notes that outer tunnel information often differs even when inner packet data stays the same.
Technical Breakdown
ASN’s Enhanced User Session Identification is presented as a way to make user session keys longer by adding tunnel and QoS attributes. The blog describes the feature as allowing operators to inject additional fields into the session key to distinguish traffic flows.
Supported attributes called out in the post include outer source IP, outer destination IP, GTP TEID, outer DSCP, and inner DSCP. The blog adds that the feature is configurable so operators can add or omit only needed fields, and that deployments with the feature switched off continue using the conventional session-identification mechanism.
Operational Impact
For network operators, the blog links the enhanced session identifiers to improved flow separation, stating that traffic for separate subscriber or service accounts is tracked as its own user session. It also connects enhanced session identity to more accurate IMSI correlation and more granular mapping from subscriber details to user sessions.
ASN describes the same enriched session key as used to create Kafka topic keys and IPFIX flow keys, so downstream analytics receive unique session identifiers without changing the end-to-end analytics architecture. It also states that user session keys can be configured to include required tunnel attributes while maintaining backward compatibility with existing deployments.
This vendor post describes Enhanced User Session Identification, which extends Inner 5-Tuple-based session keys with configurable tunnel and QoS attributes to separate subscriber or service traffic and improve session-scoped metadata and KPI exports. Blog Signals brief is a fact-based summary of the vendor blog.
Source: aviznetworks.com, by Infant Ruban Suresh.