It is well understood by now that operators will adopt a dramatic new approach to network planning in order to maximize efficient usage of spectrum and RAN resources, and so ensure that the dams do not burst under the mobile data deluge. Many thousands of small cells, and HetNets creating huge pools of capacity, available on-demand, from a melange of different frequencies and technologies ‘ this is the vision for a mobile network that can handle future mobile behaviors, and still deliver profits to its operator. However, there is a fine line between HetNet efficiency and HetNet chaos, and thousands of ill-planned cells will be worse than a few large ones. This raises an issue that some operators admit they have been reluctant to confront head-on ‘ the need for complete transformation in the OSS (operations support system) and all the associated network management tools. Complex networks and unpredictable usage patterns will require a new approach to network operations, at a time when further change will be driven by the convergence of those activities with data center-based BSS (business support systems); and by the start of significant uptake of virtualization, especially NFV (Network Functions Virtualization).
The dramatic new approach to RAN planning will both drive, and be enabled by, the availability of new generation network tools and will put a strong spotlight on optimization and SON (self-organizing network) products in particular. Once many of these capabilities were expected to be implemented by the hardware makers, but the rising complexity of their tasks has given rise to a new wave of software offerings from dedicated vendors such as Intucell, Eden Rock, Celcite and Reverb Networks. These, in turn, are becoming the target for acquisition by larger players, but not always the traditional network OEMs ‘ instead, companies from the data center world are not only adapting enterprise platforms for carriers’ back end systems, but harnessing the trend for IT/network convergence to move more deeply into the heart of the operator’s network. This has been seen recently in Amdocs’ acquisition of SON vendor Celcite and geolocation specialist Actix, some of its steps to create a full OSS platform to sit alongside its established back office offerings. Previous to that, Citrix acquired Bytemobile, and perhaps the most important M&A event in this field was Cisco’s takeover of Intucell. This deal almost guaranteed the router vendor a place in AT&T’s 4G roll-out and, combined with the acquisition of small cell technology with Ubiquisys, allows Cisco to offer a metrocell platform that should worry the established suppliers.
Those suppliers will be making acquisitions too, since many have slipped behind in key areas like SON, which will become increasingly critical with the deployment of small cells, LTE-Advanced (which does standardize some of the mechanisms) and HetNets. In late 2010, Ericsson acquired Spanish optimization and SON firm Optimi, but while the giant is said to have a couple of trials in Europe, the platform will not be fully ready until 2014 ‘ indicating the hefty development effort required, even for the largest firms. NSN is building SON capabilities on top of its NetAct network management platform and this was one factor which gained it a welcome place in T-Mobile USA’s LTE awards. Alcatel-Lucent is also working on tools which would be heavily integrated with its HetNet kit such as lightRadio.
However, with a few exceptions like Intucell, most new-generation SON companies admit they will not have their offerings complete until next year, when a wave of investment by carriers can be expected. In anticipation, network planning specialists are joining forces to gain greater scale and to offer OEM partners, integrators and operators a more complete solution. SON, especially when combined with geolocation (like Amdocs’s Actix/Celcite combination) is particularly important. For instance, InfoVista has acquired Malaysian optimization vendor Aexio and has a reseller deal with Eden Rock for SON; and JDS Uniphase bought location-oriented specialist Arieso earlier this year. While many SON vendors have come from the optimization field, there are pure-play start-ups too, such as Reverb Networks of Israel, which moved into the field in 2011 to provide ‘pure-play SON with no legacy platforms’, as CEO Zoran Kehler puts it. Kehler says the market has, so far, mainly been focused on 3G but he expects the LTE business to open up significantly in the second half of 2014.
However, he points out that various factors need to come together to provoke a really sharp uptake of 4G SON in mid-2014. An important one is the ability to support multivendor networks ‘ always a double-edged sword for OEMs, though Ericsson, Huawei and NSN have committed to interoperability with their OSSii initiative. That needs to become more than just talk, says Kehler, as do 3GPP specs for interfaces at the network management layer, which exist on paper but are not yet implemented for LTE. He also believes vendors need to refine their offerings for small cells, in anticipation of a boom in deployments towards the end of 2014. ‘We won’t replicate all the use cases of the 3GPP SON definitions for small cells and HetNet, only those with high value such as mobile load balancing,’ he said. ‘Self-deployment is becoming a clearer use case for carriers like AT&T, and some areas of self-optimization. But we could even deviate from use case definitions as operator needs become clearer.’
In other words, HetNet is the wild west, and the success of the deployments will rely on vendors and OSS tools not only being reworked significantly to make the most of the new RANs, but will also have to be flexible enough to adapt to carrier requirements which are not yet clear. It is plain that the changes will be heavily driven by pioneering operators ‘ Kehler points to their strong demand for SON and geolocation to be combined, so that network performance can be tracked in a very granular way and users can be tracked to their precise location. Information on a particular user’s current position, and the quality of their current connection, can then feed into BSS activities such as marketing (presenting them with a targeted promotion) or service assurance (allowing the operator to deal with a poor connection by transferring the user to Wi-Fi, or proactively offering an apology, for instance).
Three key areas of operator investment are converging for the new network ‘ big data/analytics platforms, with companies like Guavus becoming very cellco-focused; policy management; and optimization/SON. All these need to come together to create a platform capable of delivering the performance and commercial promises of the HetNet. This is highlighted by the findings of a new report from Maravedis-Rethink, ‘The Network is Software Now: Adapting to the new mobile economics 2013-2018’, in which the network deployment and investment plans of the top 40 mobile groups worldwide are surveyed and modelled on a case-by-case basis.
This report predicts massive upheaval in the BSS/OSS community as a result of IT/network convergence and HetNet management needs, which will open new opportunities for data center firms and for start-ups which have led in strategic areas such as SON, geolocation, advanced analytics and dynamic management tools.
The other important trend which will affect the future of OSS is the move to software defined networking and virtualization, which will gather pace from late 2014. This will see some of the functions of specialized packet core appliances implemented as software applications on commodity servers or routers, leading to the need for a new set of interoperability standards and interfaces between the virtualized apps and the network.
Current OSS/BSS systems are ill-suited to the new world of dynamic bandwidth allocation, on-demand services and SDN. They were developed for an era when connections were made singly and remained in place for a long time. ‘The current OSS system is broken, and it’s going to be replaced,’ Ralph Santitoro, director of strategic market development at Fujitsu Network Communications, told last month’s Ethernet and SDN Expo, echoing the sentiments expressed by many speakers and delegates. He went on: ‘You can no longer patch it. It’s too expensive; it’s a 20-25 year old architecture; it doesn’t follow the new paradigms.’
There are some areas of consensus, particularly that the modern OSS will have to operate in real time, its actions synchronized at all times with the network state. Another important change will be the blurring of lines between network layers, such as packet and optical, which currently work in isolation. With SDN, multiple layers may be provisioned simultaneously, as well as very rapidly on-demand.
However, there are differences on how to address the challenges, and whether existing systems ‘ which represent massive investments of dollars and effort over two decades ‘ can be adapted or need to be thrown out completely, a huge decision for a carrier which is low on time, budget and tolerance of risk. Margaret Chiosi, distinguished network architect at AT&T, which is in the forefront of both SDN and HetNet deployment plans, concluded that management and orchestration with an SDN controller is so different that ‘this whole concept of an OSS and an EMS [element management system] all the way down, it’s actually probably archaic.’
Some carriers are biting the bullet, such as Deutsche Telekom, which is trialling its Terastream platform in Croatia. This isolates the service layers and network models from the lower transport access layers, an architecture which it is initially using for OSS/BSS virtualization. Most operators will be unwilling to opt for full replacement, given the potential disruption to customer services and smooth running of the network. The lack of appetite for big bang transformation of the network has already been seen in the hugely cautious adoption of IMS, once billed as the platform that would revolutionize operators’ businesses, but now being belatedly and tentatively introduced alongside LTE and, in particular, VoLTE. Many operators believe SDN, and particularly NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), are more inevitable, and more clearly beneficial, than IMS, but they are still nervous of rapid or radical change in the BSS/OSS field.
A common option will be to keep current OSS/BSS systems running while building new platforms specifically for new networks and services. Some software providers are even offering the option of provisioning in an SDN-friendly manner without touching the OSS layer, an approach which was presented by Michael Kearns, CEO of Amartus, which provides software defined service orchestration software. This allows a carrier to describe an abstract model of a new service, and the firm’s Chameleon OS tool translates this into the language of the existing OSS.
Another major issue will be interoperability. While large OEMs are critical to drive innovation, they tend to use their developments to keep carriers locked into their own networks. NSN is taking a leadership position in SDN, having implemented the functions of its entire evolved packet core (EPC) on a standard ATCA chassis, along with elements of the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), and specialized functions for policy management, deep packet inspection and content delivery. This is giving its established network management system, NetAct, a newly strategic role in gluing all the apps together and linking them to new functionality such as SON.
Such activities are important to instil confidence in the market, but remain single-vendor in most cases. Yet the demand for multivendor capabilities is so strong that even the firms whose power rests in their own networks are being forced to move towards standards, and so help to simplify ‘ and therefore kickstart ‘ deployment of new-look OSS. This year’s TM Forum saw a breakthrough as the top three wireless infrastructure vendors – Ericsson, NSN and Huawei ‘ signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on standard interfaces which could reduce OSS integration costs for carriers, and allow new services to be deployed more rapidly.
The OSS interoperability initiative (OSSii) is a reciprocal agreement that will cover fault, performance and configuration management as well as basic network event and trace management for the northbound interfaces from the RAN, circuit core and packet core systems. The three firms have committed to bilateral cross-licensing agreements for multivendor network management and other OSS companies will be encouraged to join and take part in cross-licensing activity, and in the planned interoperability testing program.
‘The OSS marketplace is a patchwork of standards and proprietary interfaces that are controlled by the IPR owners. With cross-license agreements, we want to help operators take full advantage of the best available products in our industry,’ said Peter Patomella, head of OSS at NSN, at the launch.
As Kehler pointed out, the proof will be in the results, and industry alliances are well known for delivering statements rather than concrete specs, but there is considerable hope centered on OSSii.
To conclude, the key technologies to deliver performance and profit from operators’ mobile networks will increasingly be software not hardware, and capex investments will shift in this direction, and particularly to three critical challenges ‘ converging OSS and BSS and making them part of a larger service level architecture which is focused on the customer, not the network; making sense of HetNets with sophisticated SON and geolocation tools; and moving gradually towards full carrier SDN. All of these will create significant opportunities for specialized vendors, and result in a 4G OSS/BSS platform that will, by the end of the decade, be unrecognizable from the current systems.
For more information, and an executive summary, of Maravedis-Rethink’s upcoming report, ‘The Network is Software Now: Adapting to the new mobile economics 2013-2018′, please contact Adlane Fellah, head of customer engagement, on [email protected]. Further details of the report will be included in the next issue of Wireless Watch.
SK Telecom demonstrates virtualized EPC:
It may be a decade-long process, but virtualization and software defined networking (SDN) will take over the carriers’ networks ‘like the tide rolling in’, as Telstra CTO Hugh Bradlow put it ‘ and the first element to be implemented as an application on commodity hardware will, in the majority of cases, be some or all of the EPC (evolved packet core).
Other network elements such as the RAN itself, or at least its baseband processing, will also be virtualized over time but with some exceptions, notably China Mobile’s huge Cloud-RAN project, the focus in the next few years will be on the packet core. SK Telecom, for instance, has implemented some aspects of Cloud-RAN already, but is deploying flexible baseband functionality on base station hotels rather than going the whole way to running it in software on an x86 server ‘ the true end point of a RAN SDN strategy like that of the leading Chinese cellco.
However, SK Telecom is ahead of its Chinese counterpart in virtualizing the packet core, and has already demonstrated a proof of concept implementation with NSN. For its part, the vendor is staking considerable hopes on leading the mobile broadband market from hardware to software. It has already implemented many aspects of the EPC, and functions like policy management, in software on commodity ATCA platforms, in a bid to push ahead of Ericsson and Huawei now it has focused all its efforts on mobile networks. It claims to be the only vendor which has successfully demonstrated a complete EPC solution in a cloud environment, including virtualized Mobility Management Entity (MME) and S/P-Gateway elements.
The partners said that the virtualized EPC was already showing significant advantages, including capacity scaling to meet rises (and falls) in data throughput and signalling traffic. A software EPC helps to optimize services for the network and user environment, and has reduced operating costs because it is running on off-the-shelf IT hardware. ‘We have now verified the feasibility of telco cloud technology and can now make plans for our future commercial cloud solutions for enhanced flexibility and operational efficiency,’ said Choi Jin-sung, EVP and head of ICT R&D at SK Telecom.
The effort fits in with other SK Telecom activities, such as its deployment of NSN’s Liquid Applications technology, which incorporates a server within the base station in order to deliver rich media services and content close to the user. And while it may be more cautious than China Mobile about running the RAN as an app in the near future, it did recently announce a collaboration with Intel on a virtualized base station (vRAN), which can load and reconfigure key network functions in software on an x86 server, in the same way that apps are loaded and deleted. Under the new agreement, the two firms have agreed to build a vRAN testbed and carry out joint R&D on intelligent base stations and cloud base stations, mirroring Intel’s deep alliance with the Chinese C-RAN driver.
Trials and even deployments of virtualized EPCs should gather pace in 2014, and it is not only Asian operators driving the trend. Orange has been vocal about its interest in virtual EPC, and the big US carriers, especially AT&T, are becoming increasingly software driven. The most important multivendor technology in these trials will be NFV, a would-be standard created under ETSI auspices and specifically geared to the particular needs of carrier, rather than enterprise, networks. Once trials turn into commercial deployments from later in 2014, there will be an expanding market for software-only EPCs, changing the financial balance for established vendors and ushering in new players.