Ercom said it recently sold its Mobipass network emulation solution to a major Korean player, with Mobipass deployed in the Korean customer’s labs for LTE.
The Korean customer was unnamed, but described as “always at the cutting edge of technology”.
“They were looking for a network validation and optimization tool partner with a very aggressive roadmap and able to support them in the long term,” according to Ercom.
Ercom’s vice president of marketing, Guy Lecurieux Lafayette recently spoke at the LTE North America conference in Dallas on how network emulation will be helpful to mobile operators as they deploy more heterogeneous networks that include not only macro sites, but small cells as well, with the added components of self-organizing networks (SON) and eICIC to cut down on interference in a HetNet.
“Nowadays, the networks are getting more and more complex — different modes, different frequencies. Much more complicated that what we had before,” said Lecurieux Lafayette. “This makes things very difficult to validate and optimize, and operators have to change their ways of deploying the network if they want to be successful and get all the benefits of LTE on the HetNet.”
Lecurieux Lafayette compared Mobipass to a flight simulator, allowing mobile operators to put a network through its paces before and even after deployment for testing and troubleshooting purposes.
Traditional testing only allows the connection of a few user equipment devices to validate key functions, he noted. Operators have historically done radio network planning to figure out where and how to position cells and set power levels, and then gone to trials or turned on the network and then tried to optimize.
“That approach has limitations,” Lecurieux Lafayette said, because it doesn’t allow emulation of network loads to test limits and anticipate problems, and in-field troubleshooting is pricey.
“The more time you spend in the field trying to optimize your network, the more expensive it is,” he added.
Lecurieux Lafayette said that Mobipass can enable the emulation of complicated scenarios such as several thousand users connected to the network with 30% using Voice over LTE, 50% using video and the rest using web-browsing and play with the scenario in order to determine the limitations of their network and the quality of service that will result.
“I can modify the parameters of the network, re-run the situation and see what the differences are,” he explained. “I can identify key parameters on the network, and which ones will give me the best efficiency.”
