As next-generation speeds make their way into the wireless world, operators face the challenge that the resulting deluge of traffic on their networks may be too much to monitor, setting the stage for a potential crisis.
Operation support systems, which have eaten humble pie until recently, are coming into higher favor as an increasing number of companies see OSS at once as the Cinderella and quiet savior of burdened networks.
OSS is a Cinderella because it sits on the periphery of operations, and a quiet savior because it may make the difference between efficient services and total network breakdown.
“Carriers are evolving from the legacy OSS and billing systems to support 2.5 generation and EDGE,” said Rick Findlay, director of wireless industry solutions at Covergys Inc. “But they lack the real-time capability for next-generation services.”
The industry is on the cusp of a barrage of new services as vendors and content providers unleash their creative and entrepreneurial wherewithal for various offerings to carriers and end users.
Such services include video and audio streaming, data and enhanced voice, picture message, Internet downloads of a wide variety, short message services, instant messaging, prepaid services and ringtones. The list keeps growing.
All of these services come with different packets and at such speed that a failure to track them holds the potential of affecting crucial services like billing and customer retention.
“With increased network speed, we will have a mix of different packets in the same transport,” said Richard Reynolds, co-founder of Psytechnics Inc. “With that situation, it is a case of delivering the right service quality.”
He explained that jitters or latency can arise when the system cannot get its priorities right regarding which packet to deliver at what time. Congestion also results. Ultimately voice often suffers, which remains the killer application.
“This will have an impact on real-time services of voice,” said Reynolds.
He said at the moment, OSS has not been able to quantify the number of records in the transport layer, which come in milliseconds.
The network could be saddled with up to 10,000 records per second and that can use up the central processing unit, which generates the report, according Samir Sharma, senior marketing manager at P-Cube. If the router does the reporting, it reduces the router performance in the network, he said.
“If the records are too much, the CPU can blow up,” he said.
Sharma also identified the challenge he called in-band and out-of-band problems. He said the in-band issue can be tackled within the network, while the out-of-band problem can be handled with a separate dedicated channel for end users.
“With voice over Internet Protocol, the system is beginning to have awareness of the quality of traffic that will be delivered,” Reynolds remarked.
Voice quality, which is measured by what is called mean opinion score, falls in categories ranging from 1 to 5 and respectively, bad to excellent. In the middle range are “poor” with two points, “fair” with three and “good” with four.
Vendors and carriers are saddled with the responsibility to integrate voice quality to mobile phones, base stations and media gateways. It becomes imperative to ascertain voice quality so it can be reported back for fault finding. This lays the foundation for a network with quality awareness.
Most carrier networks, however, still face the challenge of scaling the hurdle.
It is all about what Findlay calls the three Cs-communication, content and commerce, which will define next-generation services. Communication refers to ensuring the routing of traffic with the cargo of voice, data and as well as audio and video streaming. Content refers to identifying what content and where it is going and when it should be there.
This demands a great deal of intelligence in the system.
Commerce, which is perhaps the crux of the matter from a profit-making perspective, refers mainly to billing.
“The system should be able to advise about charges before transactions happen in real time,” said Reynolds.
If the OSS lacks adequate intelligence to track all the massive traffic, it will create huge losses not only for the carriers but also for their content-provider partners.
“It’s important for those providing new kinds of content as well,” he said.
He said that billing systems should enable the carriers to bill not only for their own business, but also on behalf of partners. Systems should also offer conditional billing.
Crucial with OSS is the ability of the various parts of the network to work in concert, which includes billing, as well as mediation, ordering, provisioning, rating and settlement.
“It comes down to identifying with the carriers and developing with and for them strategic plans to integrate solutions into their legacy environments,” said Reynolds.
Reynolds and Sharma identified some solutions that have begun to emerge. One of them, according to Reynolds, is called the traffic shaper, which is a box that allocates bandwidth and grooms traffic. Least-cost routing is another one that distributes traffic in different routes based on cost and quality.
Sharma said P-Cube provides the filtering and aggregation of data, which can reside anywhere in the network. The other solution channels only what is needed at a particular time to the network.
The final and major challenge to carriers is whether to build a separate OSS system, which is expensive, or build the advanced system into their legacy networks.
Sharma said the best option is to build the OSS system for the carriers into their network services.
“It becomes a symbiotic business,” said Sharma, “and carriers can run their services more efficiently.”
