Ensuring Mobile Broadband Service Quality with Route Analytics

By Packet Design
Published 2009, Posted March 2009

Abstract:

Faced with considerable mobile phone market penetration causing greater competition and price erosion, mobile operators are under increasing pressure to compensate by increasing their data service revenues. Operators have responded in recent years by deploying High Speed Packet Access capabilities in their 3G networks to achieve broadband speeds, and are rolling out IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) control planes to enable a plethora of converged, IP-based person to person and person to content applications and services. All of these trends mean that mobile operators are increasingly reliant on underlying IP networks to deliver data traffic that is far more sensitive than "best effort" Internet access. Given that service quality is a critical differentiator for mobile operators, it is imperative that these IP networks meet the highest quality standards themselves. The challenge is that due to their dynamic routing control planes, IP networks are inherently unpredictable in their behavior and worse - that very unpredictability means that traditional network management tools cannot deliver critical management visibility into the changing behavior of routing and service traffic flows.

Route analytics technology, which taps into the network’s live routing protocol control plane to provide real-time, network-wide insight of the operational routing topology and the traffic flowing across all network paths and links, provides the missing visibility. With route analytics, mobile broadband IP network engineers can establish and maintain SIGTRAN compliance for the IP network control plane, speed problem resolution, strengthen change management processes, proactively uncover network vulnerabilities, increase capacity planning efficiency and accurately simulate failure scenarios and resulting network behavior. Effective use of route analytics as part of the IP network management portfolio can help mobile operators build more profitable data service revenue streams by ensuring high service quality, leading to lower subscriber churn and reacquisition costs while increasing network engineering and operations efficiency.