Tekelec ‘probes’ cheaper, more ubiquitous mobile data monitoring

One of the challenges in dealing with the onslaught of data usage on mobile networks is that operators need to change how they think about monitoring their networks. There’s simply no way to actively watch all that traffic – let alone the apps running on top of those mobile data networks – in the same way service providers monitored the network and services on their traditional voice networks.

That reality has operations support system and test vendor Tekelec forwarding the concept of intelligent data management (IDM), a different take on network and service monitoring that gives carriers the ability “to be a little more flexible and dynamic related to network conditions at any point in time,” said Michael Heffner, director of product management for Tekelec. “In the last 12 months, we’ve been working with our customers to find a better way to skin the cat in terms of handling the massive amount of data growth they are experiencing.”

The problem is the sheer volume of mobile data – and increasingly packetized voice – traffic running over today’s 3G and 4G networks. Operators must compare that to yesterday’s “circuit-switched 2G model, where it was easy to monitor control signaling to get a picture of what was going on with the network and with the quality of voice service,” Heffner said.

The challenge with mobile data services (and mobile voice-over-IP services, too) is that monitoring “pure signaling only does part of it; you have to look at what is going on in the user plane as well, what services are being used and how well they are functioning,” Heffner said. “As user plane traffic is blowing up it is very cost prohibitive to look at [and monitor] 100% of the traffic all of the time.”

In essence, keeping tabs on 100% of network traffic is a “legacy” of legacy voice networks that operators simply can’t afford to maintain, Heffner said. Instead, Tekelec is promoting putting new, patent-pending software algorithms onto its existing network probes – no new hardware deployment required – to enable operators to do real-time statistical sampling of the traffic running over their mobile data networks. Those samples are pulled up into traditional centralized monitoring platforms for analysis and review.

The challenge is doing that sampling well enough so that operators can still get a clear, actionable view into their mobile data network performance without having to peek into all the packets traversing their networks, Heffner said. The vendor’s IDM approach also makes it possible for operators to “on-demand” drill down deeper to further examine specific network, service or application problems, he said.