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In today’s mobile industry, service providers are finding they no longer face the choice of, “Do I or don’t I evolve my network to a next generation environment?” If they want to compete in the mobile data services space, they’ve got to go to 3G+ and plan for 4G/LTE. There is no question that the unprecedented growth in mobile data traffic driven by Apple Inc.’s iPhone and other bandwidth hungry devices and applications gives mobile operators a great opportunity for revenue growth. But successfully handling the data traffic growth also presents a significant challenge.
One domain that we are finding requires critical attention is the backhaul infrastructure. As legacy technology struggles to cope with the data influx, mobile operators are left with no choice but to look to IP/Carrier Ethernet to combat the viral traffic growth. According to a recent report from Infonetics, most service providers have short term plans to move towards a packet-based backhaul environment.
There are a number of advantages to be gained from an all-IP network infrastructure. It provides the ease of deployment and bandwidth to deliver both packet-based voice and data services over a common transport backbone, while at the same time driving down “per-bit” costs.
While mobile operators are seeing IP and Carrier Ethernet as clear choices for future-proofing the mobile backhaul infrastructure, they face a number of management challenges that must be addressed in order to successfully introduce a packet-based mobile backhaul network. Here are a few of the challenges I believe deserve careful consideration:
–Managing the complexities associated with class of service and MPLS traffic engineering: IP and Carrier Ethernet, as compared with traditional TDM, brings more complex concepts like classes of service, VLANs, virtual circuits and MPLS tunnels. Although operators entrust the assurance of the mobile backhaul to the same transmission teams that managed the more deterministic TDM backhaul, they need to ensure that those teams are also equipped with the same level of operational and engineering capabilities they had with TDM. With the right tools, they can assure and engineer all these entities holistically.
–Assuring the performance of emulated traditional technologies over Carrier Ethernet: Consideration must also be given to the radio access network and its criticality to the delivery of voice and data services. Although operators embrace IP/MPLS and Carrier Ethernet to “future-proof” against explosive data growth and next-generation mobile networks (4G), they still have to support their legacy 2G and even early 3G radio networks, which use legacy transport formats like TDM or ATM. This is where pseudowire or circuit emulation technologies are enabling operators to seamlessly support legacy transmission interfaces over a pure packet network. Nevertheless, transport connections to individual cell sites are still prone to multiple problems ranging from weather to careless configuration changes. While the operations team traditionally managed the tools that tested the legacy connectivity, it now needs similar tools to assure the availability and quality of such emulated connections in the backhaul.
–Rightsizing Ethernet backhaul infrastructures: While mobile data and content traffic volumes will continue to grow exponentially, revenue will not. As a result, driving down the per-bit cost for transporting data traffic is key, which means it is critical to rightsize the infrastructure components that constitute the network. But rightsizing is not a one-time activity; it is an ongoing process to keep up with new traffic patterns that may result from disruptive business decisions (e.g., the introduction of iPhones) or user and demographic behavior (e.g., New York’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve). Industry-proven concepts such as “busy day” and “busy hour” designations are crucial in determining the worst stress levels of the backhaul network. Additionally, hourly baselines, engineering benchmarks such as 95th percentile, and accurate traffic forecasts based on historical traffic usage are indispensible to achieving the objective of rightsizing the network and planning maintenance and engineering activities intelligently. Being able to accomplish this down to every sub-element (interface, class of service, and VLAN) requires industry-grade assurance tools that demonstrate proven scalability and performance.
–Ensuring a quality end-user experience: Finally, while rightsizing is important to attaining the objective of cost containment, this goal must be held in balance with quality of experience. Customers who have signed up for expensive data service packages, especially those traveling on business, expect a certain quality of user experience. When they don’t get it, they become a strong candidate for churn – and will likely switch to a competitor. What complicates the matter is that reduced infrastructure investment invariably leads to a degraded QoE for end users. So, not only is it important to perpetually rightsize the network infrastructure, but also to ensure that the appropriate QoE is preserved.
Proactive assurance of the mobile backhaul is critical in addressing this challenge. End-to-end quality degradations in the mobile backhaul lead to local market/regional issues that affect service experience for an entire population of mobile users. And with operators looking to push their top-line revenue by introducing more and more value-added applications that are streaming-oriented (e.g., video) and real-time (e.g., gaming), monitoring and measurement across the multiple classes of traffic separation is essential to assuring end-to-end quality.
So how can mobile operators, or their wholesale network infrastructure providers, successfully meet all of these important management challenges? They should begin by seeking an IP/Ethernet-based performance management and assurance solution that provides proactive performance management and reporting capabilities across a multi-vendor backhaul environment. The right solution will allow operators to exploit the advantages of Ethernet backhaul while, at the same time, ensuring the all-important quality of experience that end users demand.
Ranga Thittai is senior product manager for InfoVista, a leading proactive service assurance management software company. InfoVista empowers telecom operators, services providers and large enterprises to maximize business return and productivity by assuring the optimal performance of mission-critical networked services, applications, and infrastructures. Ranga can be reached at rthittai@infovista.com.
