MWC: Alcatel-Lucent making Network Guardian live up to its name

For three years, Alcatel-Lucent’s (NYSE:ALU) Wireless Network Guardian has been the covert informant on many wireless networks, reporting back to their operator owners any mobile event of note, but never acting. At Mobile World Congress this year, Alcatel-Lucent has decided to give the Guardian some muscle, allowing it to intervene when problems occur rather than just monitor them.

ALU is integrating Network Guardian with its Dynamic Services Controller, the platform the handles policy charging and rules function (PCRF) for mobile networks, into a unified solution it calls Intelligent Traffic Management (ITM). Essentially, ITM combines brains and brawn, creating a solution that can analyze all traffic as it comes off the cell, identify congestion and problem spots in the network, and then lay down the QoS hammer to mitigate those problems before they happen, said Andrew McDonald, vice president and general manager of ALU’s Network and Service Management Product Unit.

There are dozens of other policy management platforms in market, but McDonald said ALU believes integrating the Guardian with its PCRF gives it a distinct edge. No other policy manager using deep packet inspection (DPI) or other traffic sniffing methods can delve as far into the network, McDonald said. While other vendors are starting to push their analytical capabilities closer to the edge of the network, their platforms are still essentially stuck in the network core, tracking packets long after they’ve left the radio access network (RAN), McDonald said. Meanwhile, the Guardian sits in the RAN itself, where it can track high-volume subscribers as they move between cells and thus predict the traffic carnage they’ll create as those subscribers converge on a specific cell.

“It’s very hard to take action before a problem occurs unless you have very accurate information,” McDonald said. “We are able to see mobility events as they are happening. … Now knowing that a cell is entering a congested state, we can immediately enforce fair usage.”

For example, say two subscribers watching high-bandwidth video enter a specific cell already crowded with more moderate data users. The Guardian would then alert the DSC, which depending on the operator’s business rules can do one of several things. It could simply de-prioritize those video packets, sending them to the bottom of the QoS ladder; or it could impose video optimization striping frames or resolution out of the video stream—both of which would allow the users to keep watching their videos. Meanwhile, the ITM policy enforcer could temporarily suspend to all users’ background data flows, such as application updates. If one of the high-volume users subscribes to premium video service, the policy engine could actually prioritize his traffic over all others. Or if they both happen to be low-tier users with plans that allow them to access data only in low-traffic conditions, ITM could suspend their video streams temporarily sending the subscribers push notifications that they’ve entered a congested area.

McDonald said ITM is in trials with one major European operator today, but its potential reach is large since its DSC and the Network Guardian are already deployed by dozens of operators and not always the same operators. In the U.S., the Guardian is being used by AT&T (NYSE:T), Sprint (NYSE:S), U.S. Cellular (NYSE:USM) and at least one other operator, McDonald said.