Network Performance Management for Next Generation Mobile Networks
Overview
The evolution of mobile data services has brought an inevitable demand for greater bandwidth and the expectation of a flawless end-user experience. Mobile service providers can address the bandwidth challenge with IP-based network solutions supporting 3G and 3G+ traffic. However, to ensure the high levels of end user quality experience (QoE) needed to prevent subscriber dissatisfaction and churn as well as lost customers and lost revenue, service providers must be able to:
- Monitor aggregated data service quality across all domains of the network infrastructure, especially as it relates to high-value enterprise customers
- Correlate service performance to the service delivery topology
- Efficiently troubleshoot, communicate and resolve end-user problems across organizational boundaries (service operations, mobile packet core engineering and IP engineering)
- Improve customer experience of real-time data services by managing end-to-end quality on the data delivery paths
- Engineer mobile resources and supporting transmission nodes together for future traffic growth and the adoption of new services
InfoVista’s Mobile Knowledge Pack is a solution that takes on the aforementioned challenges and equips mobile service providers with the intelligence and topology awareness they need to manage their mobile packet core network infrastructures and application delivery environments—and deliver quality, high-availability services.
InfoVista in the mobile packet core network
Key Benefits
The Mobile Knowledge Pack aids various user groups within a service provider organization:
- Organizations like the service operations center (SOC) and customer care organization can now report on the availability and quality of consumer and enterprise mobile data services, as well as quickly drill down to identify network root causes, to better address service quality improvement with their engineering counterparts
- Engineers, using the solution’s topology-aware monitoring capabilities, can sectionalize and view traffic distributions in order to groom their network infrastructures and streamline capital expenditures
- Network operations, too, can leverage this topology awareness to quickly troubleshoot, investigate and resolve problems in the functioning of the packet core nodes (SGSNs and GGSNs) and in the mobile backhaul
- Packet core engineers can monitor end-to-end quality metrics like latency, jitter and packet loss on the Gn and IuPs paths to assure the end-user experience of real-time/streaming data services and confidently introduce new 4G applications
- Product management and product marketing can view and compare the uptake of each data service and its respective impact on capacities in order to adapt marketing investments, better plan future offerings, and discuss with engineering about necessary investments
Business operations can check on SLA compliance and compare and establish priorities across private enterprise accounts, helping it to identify upsell opportunities and determine the right level of support for each customer
Thanks to InfoVista’s support of major equipment vendors, such as ADVA, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Huawei, Juniper, Nortel and Tellabs, mobile service providers can continue to leverage InfoVista’s leadership in service-centric assurance of their IP/MPLS core networks.
Key Features
The InfoVista Mobile Knowledge Pack is an add-on module that interoperates with InfoVista’s award-winning VistaInsight® for Networks, leveraging VistaInsight for Networks’ strengths in monitoring the IP/MPLS network performance. Along with its ability to manage the IP/MPLS core networks, the InfoVista Mobile Knowledge Pack tracks delivery of mobile data services, as facilitated by the mobile packet core, by monitoring:
- Aggregated data service quality
- The Serving GPRS Support Node (SGSN), which is responsible for user authentication and user mobility management
- The Gateway GPRS Support Node (GGSN), which acts as a gateway to the application-centric target networks
- Layer 2 (switch) and Layer 3 (router) platforms that support service delivery for real-time troubleshooting
- End-to-end quality parameters along the service delivery paths (Gn and IuPS)
The solution also extends into the data center to monitor platforms that enable mobile service providers to deliver applications like the Cisco Content Services Gateway (CSG), load balancers and firewalls.
