Recent enhanced access from mobile devices for video and other rich-content service traffic over 3G/4G backhaul networks is forcing service providers to manage unpredictable data traffic bursts. Furthermore, the exponential growth of multimedia data applications, video sharing, mobile social networking, and the move to 4G make a successful transition both imminent and operationally challenging. In order to manage network bandwidth and subscriber specific voice, video and data flows without causing performance degradation, providers need a means for dynamically allocating bandwidth while maintaining ubiquitous QoS across users. While deploying Carrier Ethernet “fat pipes” for enhanced backhaul transport capabilities, advances in real time network monitoring and management will be required to effectively deal with mobile subscribers broadband usage patterns.

Market Drivers Create a Wireless Backhaul Problem
Few technologies reach an overall saturation/penetration of 95% or more of U.S. households and none more quickly as cell phones. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1.

In less than 20, years almost every man, woman, and child in the U.S. now owns one or more of these devices, and in Europe adoption rates are even higher at around 118%. (Source: New York Times, 2009) As a comparison, regular telephones took nearly 100+ years to reach similar adoption rates with mainstay durables such as radio, color TV, stoves, refrigerators, electricity, and automobiles each requiring in excess of 30 years. More importantly, the newest types of cellular devices, smartphones, are driving significant changes in today’s telecommunications networks.

A “smartphone may be thought of as a handheld computer integrated within a mobile telephone.” (Source: Wikipedia, 2010) These smartphones feature the capabilities to communicate via voice, text, and data messaging, Internet web browsing, gaming, and camera/video capabilities. Typically, manufacturers include the new iPhone by Apple, Androids, BlackBerry® by RIM, NexusOne, Palm, Samsung, and a host of others.

Arguably the most significant features of these new mobile phones have been the addition of mobile broadband browsing capabilities to access the Internet. A review of the top U.S. sites accessed by mobile users at the end of 2009, included social networking, video downloads, music and general information and search content as detailed below:

Opera Mini, top sites by unique users, US, Dec-09
Rank Site (rank Nov-09)
1. google.com (1)
2. facebook.com (2)
3. yahoo.com (3)
4. wikipedia.org (5)
5. myspace.com (4)
6. my.opera.com (7)
7. youtube.com (6)
8. cnn.com (8)
9. espn.go.com (9)
10. accuweather.com (10)
(Source: Opera)

Openwave, top domains by impressions, five-day period, unnamed US operator, Sep-09
Rank Site
1. myspace.com
2. craigslist.org
3. facebook.com
4. myxer.com
5. wap.aol.com
6. accuweather.com
7. plentyoffish.com
8. calltunes.operator.com
9. imdb.com
10. about.com
(Source: Openwave)

These new, higher-speed mobile Internet applications have significantly driven up bandwidth requirements on mobile backhaul networks, forcing service providers to scramble and add capacity while also managing unpredictable, bursty mobile data traffic from user’s rich media applications.

Various findings from AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and Cisco confirm that mobile data traffic primarily from smartphones and laptop dongles will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 108 percent between 2009 and 2014, reaching 3.6 exabytes per month by 2014 with the vast amount (66%) of the traffic being driven by video. (Sources: CiscoVisual Networking Index, Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, Feb. 2010, MobileBeat 2010 presentations by Sprint, Verizon, AT&T)

The Silent Killer: Back Office OA&M and OSS Support
So how will mobile operators begin to deal with capacity and management of these new wireless backhaul networks to support new applications and exponential data growth? Clearly the easiest solution would be to simply upgrade all cell sites to fiber and deploy new 4G LTE radio technologies to enable a new high-speed mobile Internet infrastructure.

Unfortunately, the costs are staggering. Sprint estimates upgrading to 4G for their entire footprint would cost in excess of $10B USD alone (Source: MobileBeat Conference, 2010). Furthermore, the time to complete upgrades would likely take us into a 2020 timeframe before 4G technologies reach a reasonable worldwide penetration/saturation rate supporting an estimated 50 billion 4G capable devices (Source: Ericsson estimates, 2010).

Moreover, many industry pundits, manufacturers, and operators are suggesting a quicker path for 4G than previous technologies due to lower cost chipsets, antennae innovation, LTE standards, and availability of new devices.

However, one area that few have discussed is the need for intelligent backhaul solutions to better manage and accommodate the strain on The Last Mile of access for these new mobile networks.

Historically, new telecommunications-based services have always suffered from the lag of back office systems implementation to handle easy, flow-through ordering, provisioning, management, and billing of new services in a timely manner. As an example, it arguably took the industry 25-30 years to standardize SONET/SDH WAN backhaul technology, tools, and OSS support processes for wired Layer 1 based backhaul for 2G mobile networks. With the rapid move to upgrade to 3G and 4G mobile network technologies, advances in Layer 2 Carrier Ethernet has prompted replacement of more expensive and less flexible legacy SONET/SDH backhaul which has only been a recent focus for operators over the past few years.

Backhaul Management Tools for the Mobile Broadband Juggernaut
There are several new areas that can positively impact the management of wireless backhaul networks and the overall mobile broadband ecosystem:

1. Real-time monitoring tools for mobile traffic environments.
2. Carrier Ethernet Operational Administration and Management OA&M standards for SLA administration.
3. Subscriber-based “packet awareness” techniques to identify and better manage varying applications usage.
4. Web server acceleration solutions to optimize and render content specifically for the mobile environment.

Real-time monitoring is particularly crucial in a mobile environment where smartphones, tablets, and PC USB dongle modems used for high-speed mobile broadband are becoming increasingly popular. In fact, the market for these devices is expected to reach over 2.039 billion subscribers worldwide by 2014 (Source: Ovum, Mobile Broadband Forecast, May, 2010).

In a mobile environment, monitoring must accommodate continual traffic changes in real time as subscribers move from cell site-to-cell site requiring real time base station information to better route, balance, and optimize traffic to dynamically accommodate congestion. Several tools are now available as standalone network probes from test set and performance management vendors (such as Ixia, Infovista, EXFO, HP, Brix, and others) that report traffic back to a central system to capture information and tie to a management system to initiate modifications.

As an alternative to adjunct standalone test probes, several Carrier Ethernet device manufacturers (Alcatel-Lucent, ANDA Networks) and Deep Packet Inspection companies (Allot, Packeteer, Riverbed, Sandvine) have integrated real time test capabilities directly into their devices to minimize the number of devices at the cell site while capturing user’s traffic flow information in real time to enable bandwidth optimization, load balancing, policing and shaping to dynamically accommodate congestion situations.

Higher Layer Acceleration Solutions
In addition to the standards work done recently (See Sidebar “Standards Are Good Tools!”), there are several companies that offer policy-based server solutions enabling faster caching, rendering, and optimization of web content specifically for the mobile environment. There has been a rash of acquisition activity in this area as Cisco acquired Starent, Tekelec bought Camiant, and Tellabs took WiChorus. Several other private companies with mobile optimization platforms such as Stoke Networks, Ortiva, ByteMobile, Mobix, and others optimize page size, video content, and remote caching at various points in the network to enable a better mobile broadband experience for all end subscribers.

While consumers continue to purchase smartphones and tether their laptops, tablets, and netbooks through mobile broadband 3G/4G connections, management of traffic will be key to the operator’s success and ultimately consumer satisfaction. Managing user’s mobile data traffic will require innovation in several key areas of the network to handle the congestion that can occur as subscribers increasingly use high-speed mobile devices to access their bandwidth consuming rich media applications:

1. Transport Technology: Carrier Ethernet deployments over fiber and microwave transport for higher-speed backhaul transport.

2. OA&M Standards: Real-time performance monitoring standards for dynamic optimization and management in congestion situations.

3. Mobile Network Management Tools and Software: Equipment and software-based solutions to effectively monitor, test, and address policies to handle varying user traffic scenarios in real-time.

Adding these 3 weapons in your operational support arsenal will help you better manage mobile network dropped calls, speed up download times, maximize coverage with fair use policies, and increase the general customer satisfaction of your mobile subscribers. Unfortunately, since bandwidth must increasingly be provided and billed for on some type of usage-based model vs. unlimited flat rate plans, the use of the above-mentioned tools will be even more critical for mobile network operators.

Increasingly there will only be more situations where mobile subscribers tax the network given the rate of growth and adoption of new high-speed mobile devices and bandwidth hungry viral applications. However, with these new tools and techniques, a more uniform broadband Quality of Experience (QoE) can be maintained for all users with real-time
actions for real-time results.

Standards Are Good Tools!
Several standards and industry bodies have aligned to define and ratify several standards to address end-to-end carrier Ethernet backhaul OA&M, testing, and QoS for mobile broadband backhaul networks. Five are listed below for your reference.

IEEE
802.1ag - http://www.ieee802.org/1/pages/802.1ag.html
This standard specifies protocols (Connectivity Fault Management - CFM), procedures, and managed objects to support transport fault management. These allow discovery and verification of the path, through bridges and LANs, taken for frames addressed to and from specified network users, detection, and isolation of a connectivity fault to a specific bridge or LAN. This standard will provide capabilities for detecting, verifying and isolating connectivity failures in such networks.

802.3ah - http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/802.3ah-2004.html
This interpretation of the standard covers the Discovery handshake message exchange and OAM discovery for point-to-point or adjacent node fault monitoring for Ethernet in the First Mile applications.

ITU
Y.1731 - http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Y.1731/en
The ITU-T Recommendation, Y.1731 consented at the recent meeting of Study Group 13, identifies the OAM functions needed to allow fault management (fault localization, defect detection, etc.) and performance monitoring (error counts, delay measurement, etc.) in an Ethernet network.

Y.156SAM – http://www.itu.int/md/T09-SG12-100518-TD-GEN-0271/_page.print
Draft methodology used in assessing proper configuration and performance of an Ethernet network to deliver Ethernet-based services. This out-of-service test methodology was created so service providers have a standard way of measuring the performance of Ethernet-based services.

IETF
RFC 4656, 5357 - Layer 3 TWAMP - http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-ippm-twamp-09
TWAMP or Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol uses the methodology of OWAMP (One Way Active Measurement Protocol – RFC 4656) to define an open protocol for test measurement of two-way or roundtrip metrics used in IP networks.

Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF)
http://metroethernetforum.org/page_loader.php?p_id=6
• MEF 9 definition and compliance to adhere to the Ethernet UNI level specification for terminating user to network Ethernet services.
• MEF 14 Certification focuses on Carrier Ethernet Services including Service Performance, Bandwidth Profile Rate Enforcement, Traffic Management defined in MEF 10, and complements MEF 9.
• MEF 18 Certification focuses on conformance of equipment for delivering Circuit Emulation Services over Ethernet (CESoETH).
• MEF 21 Certification focuses on Link OAM.

TeleManagement Forum (TMForum)
http://www.tmforum.org/browse.aspx?linkid=41566&docid=12610 (document)
Document discusses major carriers requirements and specifications for real-time performance management and operational procedures for next-generation mobile networks.

About the Author
Greg Gum is Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer of ANDA Networks. He brings 20+ years of product marketing and business development expertise in both start-up and Fortune 500 companies. For more information, email ggum@andanetworks.com or visit www.andanetworks.com.

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