With 3G services taking off, network optimisation is more crucial than ever. And, as Mobile Europe discovers, there are a number of services designed to provide more bangs per buck
n most countries in the developed world, mobile penetration is now so high that the market can be considered mature, with competition shifting to attracting subscribers from other operators and retaining the ones you’ve already got, while profitability is achieved by minimising capex and OPEX and increasing share of wallet with existing customers. All of which means providing high levels of service to keep and improve customer satisfaction, while at the same time keeping spending on infrastructure to the minimum necessary.
In such a scenario, it is not surprising that network optimisation has become a hot topic as mobile telephony moves from 2G through 2.5G and into 3G. Established players and new start-ups alike are announcing their capabilities in maximising the bang to be achieved for operators’ bucks.
Furthermore, as Larry Richards, head of product line management at NEC Networks in EMEA, pointed out, “if an operator finds it has a hole in its coverage where a new base station is needed, with optimisation it can defer the investment until it has the revenue level to justify the spend.”
In other words, optimising network performance can help fill that hole with existing infrastructure, until the subscriber base and utilisation rates grow to a point that a new piconode B is truly essential. At which point the revenue coming from the network will also have grown to make the investment more palatable. In such scenarios, optimisation is a way not only of keeping a lid on infrastructure spending, but also of staggering it to coincide more accurately with revenue growth.
NEC is an example of a leading equipment provider that, since 2002, has been offering its network optimisation services, even to operators who have deployed someone else’s hardware. “In one case we were called in to look at a network in Japan that had already been optimised by the original provider of the equipment, and we still managed to squeeze an additional 20% in performance out of it,” said Kevin Maher, senior manager of the projects office at the Mobile Network Solutions Division of NEC Networks in
EMEA.
Differing requirements
There are, of course, different optimisation requirements from one operator to another. “Some need to optimise for coverage, others for voice in particular, and others for data,” Maher began. “Then there are the differences between 3G operators who have a 2G business in place, who need different interworking scenarios, and greenfield 3G players whose priority is to retain subscribers on their 3G layer for as long as possible before handing them over to roaming partners, and so are looking to minimise holes in their coverage and carry out seamless 3G-to-3G handover.”
NEC focuses on the radio access network (RAN) with its optimisation services, addressing fundamentally four areas for its customers. “We look at the fundamental issues, for example antenna tilt, common channel power on the downlink, neighbouring cell relations and scrambling code allocation,” explained Maher. Neighbouring cell relations, for instance, looks at whether one cell has been defined to the radio network controller (RNC) as bordering on another, without which the RNC won’t know that it should treat them accordingly.
Beside these basic elements, however, NEC also offers services such as benchmarking to see how well a network is performing in terms of voice, video or data delivery, involving a test drive and comparisons with industry benchmarks. Regarding network optimisation as a professional services engagement first and foremost, Maher said NEC competes with other external suppliers, but also the internal services capability of the operators, and seeks to differentiate itself with its degree of flexibility, i.e. its ability to tailor the service provided to the requirements of the particular operator. The company has product offerings, he acknowledged, but they are primarily there to back up the tailored solutions it can offer its customers.
Lucent, Andrew and others
Most equipment vendors have some form of RAN optimisation offering. Lucent has its Ocelot technology, developed by its Bell Labs division, which uses a sophisticated set of algorithms to mathematically determine how best to design and configure a mobile network, taking into consideration coverage and capacity. It has been used in around 100 Metro markets in various countries for deployment and post-deployment optimisation. Ocelot is, however, currently only available for the CDMA world, addressing RANs for second-generation CDMA (now known as cdmaONE) CDMA2000 1x and UMTS, at which point it should be able to work on networks from the GSM world too.
Another example of this type of company is Andrew Corp, whose Invex3G drive test system can be used in WCDMA, CDMA and GSM/GPRS/EGDE networks, as well as Motorola’s proprietary iDEN push-to-talk networks. It scans multiple RF carriers for testing, providing what the vendor calls a “complete measurement solution for wireless network planning, maintenance, optimisation and benchmarking.”
Most players from the test and measurement arena have ambitions in this adjacent space — in fact, seeing optimisation as a natural extension of their activities, in that it uses their data to simulate and optimise the network. That said, it is one thing to be able to collect data and quite another to know how to interpret and take appropriate action, so a drive test to really put them through their paces would definitely be in order.
NetSpira
Some start-ups come at network optimisation from quite different perspectives. NetSpira, the Spanish software developer acquired in early June by Swedish telecom equipment manufacturer Ericsson, has as its core proposition an ability to carry out deep packet inspection (DPI) on content running through the “bit pipe” to end users.
The information gained from the DPI can be used for a variety of applications — the first and most obvious is enabling charging by content type. In other words, if someone is acquiring a videoclip of the current No. 1 in the charts, or watching the goal scored just a minute earlier, they should be charged more than if they’re getting a song from an album issued two years ago, or rerunning last year’s winning FA Cup Final goal.
This has been very much the thrust of NetSpira’s marketing to date, but the ability to understand exactly what is flowing through the bit pipe at any one time opens up a range of other content services, including bandwidth management. “We sit on a network and listen to detect traffic, after which we can adjust the bandwidth to have it do what we want,” said Salim Mawji, who is in the process of moving from executive VP for global business development of NetSpira to global head of business development and sales for content solutions within Ericsson NetSpira.
In other words, NetSpira’s flagship product, the ECS software, can sit alongside an operator’s GPRS gateway support node (GGSN) or, in the CDMA world, the equivalent packet data support node (PDSN), and tell it to prioritise particular data flows and throttle back others. NetSpira is currently trailing this functionality for ECS, but it is already clear that, conceptually at least, bandwidth management can be viewed as another form of optimisation. Furthermore, as Mawji pointed out, “since customer access is on the SGSN, we would optimise on the interface,” which in turn means that the RAN will again be the focus of any optimisation NetSpira’s product will eventually carry out.
Arieso
Another start-up in this space is Arieso, where CEO Shirin Dehghan commented that “we focus on RAN optimisation, but we’ll move towards self-healing networks going forward.” The company currently offers its Altaro RAN optimisation technology as a software for use by the customer or as a service, for carriers who can’t afford to buy it or who require immediate optimisation, even before their own staff is trained in how to use it.
Altaro takes performance data from switches, measurement scanners from the likes of Agilent and Ericsson, and planning data from the operators, then applies its simulation and optimisation algorithms and interfaces with thin clients on which engineers can view the results. Dehghan said a major differentiator for Arieso’s technology is its ability to simulate not only based on coverage, but also on traffic. “A lot of others only simulate on coverage, assuming uniform levels of traffic. We, on the other hand, enable operators to understand the impact of more traffic on their networks.”
The Arieso software optimises RAN factors such as antenna configuration, power supply to the control channel (which can be raised or lowered as required) and load balancing across the nodes for maximum traffic. “We also look at soft hand-off parameters, altering the loading on the power amps and threshold windows to meet the requirements of the individual operator,” its CEO continued.
Dehghan considered another of Arieso’s advantages to be the fact that it is not a planning tool vendor, which means that it must work with all the leading products in that market. “You can choose best of breed planning and we’ll work with it.” She compared this situation with offerings from companies such as Aircom, where the optimisation toll only works with Aircom’s planning tool.
For the future, Arieso wants to automate the optimisation function to deliver self-healing mobile networks, addressing the entire infrastructure and not just the RAN. At that point, Dehghan went on, “we’ll need to collect data from more sources and optimise more than just the RAN. It’ll mean detecting and adapting to hardware failure, changes in traffic and patches in coverage.” She said the company would have a first version of the self-healing network technology ready for beta testing by the end of this year.
Indoor coverage
Optimisation of in-building coverage is as challenging as its outdoor counterpart, but the challenges are quite distinct, said NEC’s Richards. “Due to the nature of WCDMA, if a subscriber is indoors using a node B outdoors, this will negatively impact that node’s capacity because it will need a disproportionate amount of power compared with outdoor users of the same node.”
In such a context, proper planning prior to deployment is actually more critical than with outdoor coverage, with an added complication being the fact that it will often not be possible to go back into a building after a node has been installed to tweak its coverage, antenna tilt and so on. “It is much more costly to make changes to an indoor node B, distributed antenna system or repeater,” added Richards. “To this end we have sophisticated indoor planning tools to make very accurate predictions.”
His colleague Maher summed up, arguing that there are two basic approaches to the optimisation issue by carriers. “One is the fire brigade approach of waiting till your call centre is inundated with complaints, then send out a test vehicle. This is reactive and costly. The other is the proactive approach of carrying out preventive optimisation, which our operational and engineering capabilities, together with the breadth of experience from our global reach, can enable.”
