re 14.17, consists of a number of elements including the serving gateway (S-GW), packet data network (PDN) gateway (P-GW), policy and charging rules function (PCRF), mobility management entity (MME), HSS, HTTP-proxy, firewalls, load balancers, DNS, and sup- porting tools. We shall focus on a subset of this architecture, shown in the green square box below. 14.4.2.1 Advantages of Virtualizing EPC Virtualization affords many opportunities to introduce new features and capabilities that were pre- viously unavailable in a physical compute solution. By deploying a virtualized packet core, many benefits of cloud computing can be realized: The ability to achieve capacity and performance increases through rapid advances associ- ated with common off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. The capability to migrate fully developed environments to new hardware without start- ing from scratch is achieved as the software is abstracted from the hardware layer once virtualized. SERVICES LTE-Uu S1-MME $1-MME LTE-Uu S5/S8 HTTP- Proxy FIGURE 14.17 EPC architecture. Service Platforms The potential to pursue best-in-class fault, configuration, accounting, and performance (FCAP) solutions, which are universally applicable across virtualized EPC nodes is realized. A reduction in the timeframe and learning curve associated with placing packet core nodes into service through automated deployment methods is achieved. A reduction in the installation time for capacity augmentation by using prepositioned COTS hardware is achieved; what used to take 6 months to rack, stack, and power in a data center can be reduced to days if not hours once virtualized systems are fully developed. The ability to independently grow VNFs within the EPC to adapt to changes in the call model to avoid congestion or risks to the business is achieved. With virtualization, EPC nodes will need to interface with other infrastructure components to include KVM as the hypervisor OS (Operating System). SDN overlays for managed communications between VNFs and systems deployed within a 