Case Study: Mobile Network Operator achieves scalable, high‑performance edge IPsec security for small‑cell networks with Advantech FWA‑5020

Mobile Network Operating Company - Customer Case Study

Mobile Network Operating Company faced rising security and capacity challenges as it moved to dense small‑cell and enterprise deployments to meet soaring urban bandwidth demand. Attack surfaces at base stations put authentication, user identity and data flows at risk, and the operator needed a way to secure traffic at the network edge while scaling to millions of subscribers and thousands of IPsec tunnels per second. To address this, the operator adopted an edge Security Gateway (SeGW) solution built around Advantech’s FWA-5020 platform.

Advantech’s FWA-5020, developed in partnership with Casa Systems, Intel and Wind River, was deployed as an edge SeGW to authenticate, authorize and encrypt traffic before it entered the core. The 1U rackmount appliance (Intel Xeon E5‑2600 v4 CPUs, up to 22 cores, high memory and PCIe/QuickAssist support) delivers high throughput and scalability — up to 40 Gbps full‑duplex on small packets, support for 1 million concurrent IPsec tunnels (2 million SAs), 5,000 tunnels/sec and IPsec throughput reported to 100–110 Gbps for 128–256 byte packets — enabling the Mobile Network Operating Company to meet 3GPP requirements, secure base stations and handle massive subscriber volumes.