LTE's impact on wireless networks

NICE, France – The impact of LTE on data traffic is well documented, with many carriers reporting marked increases in network usage when customers get access to 4G networks. Less well-known is LTE’s impact on signaling and sessions within the network, which can skyrocket as data use increases.
“What our customers are seeing is, as they role out LTE, the number of sessions that are created grows exponentially,” said Jennifer Kyriakakis, founder of real-time policy and charging specialist Matrixx Software. Kyriakakis said that very high diameter traffic mixed with complexity of services is putting a strain on some networks.
“It’s not just that you have more sessions, you also have sessions that need to touch more data within the OCF and the PCRF database, to be able to figure out what they’re going to charge and what kind of policies they’re going to transact for that specific transaction,” Kyriakakis said. “The sessions grow, they become unpredictable, the usage patterns become very unpredictable and so operators are finding that their existing systems are not able to scale to handle that.”
Locked data
Kyriakakis said that one of the ways Matrixx tries to improve network performance is by reducing the number of serialized transactions. She said that fewer serialized transactions mean less latency. The key is unlocking data during a session.
“In any system that’s based on traditional technology, every time any session touches a piece of data, that data is locked,” she explained. “That ends up creating a situation when you have a high volume of complex transcations where you’re constantly serializing transactions and that’s putting more and more latency on the system. … We don’t lock data. So we don’t have the latency issue that a lot of the other systems have.”
Kyriakakis founded Matrixx after working at telecom and media billing specialist Portal, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006.