Mobile Knowledge Pack
Network Performance Management for Next Generation Mobile Networks
Overview
InfoVista in the mobile service environment
As the scope and nature of mobile data services continue to evolve, mobile service providers are challenged by an accelerating demand for bandwidth and the expectation of a flawless user-experience. IP-based networking solutions supporting 3G, 3G+ and 4G LTE traffic can help mobile service providers address their bandwidth demands. However, to ensure high level end-user QoE and avoid churn service providers must be able to:
• Collaborate effectively across organizational silos (service operations, radio planning and engineering, data core engineering and IP engineering) to:
- Efficiently troubleshoot, communicate and resolve end-user problems,
- Collectively engineer and maintain end-to-end mobile infrastructures that support future traffic growth and facilitate adoption of new services.
• Manage end-to-end service quality of real-time mobile data and voice services by monitoring their service delivery paths across all network domains (from 4G E-UTRAN and 2G/3G RAN to S1 Interfaces on IP Backhauls and the Evolved Packet Core) through the ability to:
- Correlate service performance counters to service delivery topology,
- Monitor aggregated broadband quality end-to-end,
- Ensure services uptimes over the packet core and last mile by assuring cell site infrastructure and transport availability in real time.
• Abstract, with agility and flexibility, the multi-vendor and multi-domain key performance indicators (KPIs) and key quality indicators (KQIs) that underpin the assurance of delivered mobile data services.
InfoVista’s Mobile Knowledge Pack solution equips mobile service providers with the intelligence and topology awareness necessary to manage multi-domain network infrastructures and application delivery environments and deliver quality, high-availability services.
Key Benefits
The Mobile Knowledge Pack provides cross-domain, topology-aware visibility into the performance of mobile services. This visibility promotes collaboration across organizational silos and benefits the various functional groups within a mobile service provider’s organization to:
Engineering
- Monitor end-to-end service quality along service delivery paths to assure end-user experience of real-time/streaming data services
- Confidently introduce new infrastructure changes and deploy new 4G LTE applications
Network Operations
- Rapidly drill down to end-user data sessions for visibility into the mobile application user’s experience and easily identify third party issues
- Easily mine performance data to promptly detect and resolve problems in the radio access network (RNC, NodeB/eNodeB, and cell-site routers), data core nodes (MMEs, SGWs, SGSNs and GGSNs), as well as in traditional voice network elements (MSCs)
Service Operations
- Report on the availability and quality of consumer and enterprise mobile services and drill down to identify network root causes to better address service quality improvements with engineering
Product Management/Marketing
- View and compare subscribers’ application usage patterns and uptake of each data service to adapt marketing investments; better plan future offerings; and discuss necessary investments with engineering
Business Operations
- Verify SLA compliance; compare and establish priorities across private enterprise accounts; identify upsell opportunities; and optimize the level of support for each customer
With InfoVista’s support of major equipment vendors – such as Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Nokia Siemens Networks, Ericsson, ADVA, Juniper and Tellabs – mobile service providers can continue to leverage InfoVista’s leadership in service-centric assurance of IP/MPLS Core networks and mobile domains in managing their 3G+ and 4G LTE network infrastructures.
Key Features
The InfoVista Mobile Knowledge Pack is an add-on module that interoperates with InfoVista’s award-winning VistaInsight® for Networks and leverages VistaInsight for Networks’ strengths in monitoring the IP/MPLS backbone and Ethernet backhaul network performance. The InfoVista Mobile Knowledge Pack tracks delivery of mobile services as facilitated by the high-speed radio access networks (UMTS HSPA+, LTE), mobile data core and voice core, by providing:
• The ability to mine value-added and vendor-agnostic KPIs/KQIs on an “as needed basis” from network elements in the 4G E-UTRAN and 2G/3G RAN as well as the EPC, mobile core and data center
• Holistic, cross-domain visibility across the mobile network elements and the corresponding IP/Ethernet transport infrastructure
• The ability to troubleshoot subscriber data sessions (control plane) and provide visibility into subscriber experience by understanding mobile application usage and performance
• Correlation of mobile service impairments to underlying network resources
• The ability to accurately forecast and right-size the entire mobile network infrastructure together with transport entities to ensure that the network is sized for optimum experience
• SLA reporting to help mobile service providers enhance enterprise mobile offerings like enterprise APNs and machine-to-machine (M2M)
The Mobile Knowledge Pack fully integrates with the 5View Mobile IP appliance through the Mobile Data Manager (MDM) option of 5View Service Data Manager (SDM) for a common platform perspective of mobile network and application performance.
The solution also extends into the data center to monitor platforms such as the Cisco Content Services Gateway (CSG), load balancers and firewalls that enable mobile service providers to deliver mobile applications securely and efficiently.
