In this increasingly wireless world, the demand for applications, quality content and seamless service continues to increase. Service providers hoping to leverage opportunities, while also expanding their network must be able to deliver intelligent traffic management if they want to deliver the Quality of Experience that subscribers demand.
Alcatel-Lucent has produced a white paper on this topic entitled: Intelligent Traffic Management: Protecting the Subscriber's QoE while Securing the Integrity of the Wireless Network. This paper highlights an environment for the service provider that is much more transient and unpredictable as compared with traditional mobile voice networks. As a result, service providers are facing unique and complex challenges to maintain subscriber QoE, while also ensuring the integrity of the network.
While subscribers are striving for Intelligent Traffic Management, the visibility they have into their networks is not correlated to the subscriber and their applications. This lack of an end-to-end view makes it difficult for the service provider to identify and characterize the impact specific sources have on performance, network capacity and security.
In the wireless environment, service providers do have access to tools such as Deep Packet Inspection that monitor and manage core IP traffic, yet these tools do not provide the mobile network intelligence to identify and report on the impact that specific IP traffic has on the Radio Access Network (RAN). In using such an approach, the service provider risks addressing only the symptoms, negatively impacting other subscribers and squandering precious network resources.
To truly manage network traffic with intelligence, service providers need to understand the specific interactions between device and application traffic, as well as network performance and capacity. These worlds do overlap and a lack of knowledge as to where and how can degrade the experience for all users. To eliminate this “blind spot”, Alcatel-Lucent is offering the 9900 Wireless Network Guardian. This solution provides the unique insight needed to understand the real-time capacity of all network elements and links.
The 9900 WGN will passively monitor every subscriber’s data experience in real-time, while also automatically analyzing and identifying the root-cause issues that can contribute to the degraded experience for the subscriber. The platform can also identify those network elements that are capacity constrained, right down to the cell level.
Alcatel-Lucent also provides the 5780 Dynamic Services Controller, which performs the Process and Trigger. This controller must be tightly integrated with the 9900 WNG. The 5780 DSC is a decision engine that provides network operators with the capabilities to map business demands and network contracts into easy-to-manage network policy rules.
Overall, the network provider has a lot to manage to ensure the optimal experience for the subscriber, but to remain competitive; this demand will have to be met. In working with Alcatel-Lucent, the provider will be able to improve performance and manage traffic intelligently so as to deliver the optimal QoE for all subscribers.
