ATIS offers recommendations to optimize networks

As the demand for high-speed services grows, network operators can no longer simply throw more bandwidth at the problem but rather need a concerted strategy to optimize how such services are delivered over their networks.

That’s the conclusion of a report released this week by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) and its Network Optimization Focus Group. In addition to defining an already well-understood problem in much greater detail than is usually the case, the group examined seven network “use cases” that service providers must be able to support and made recommendations about technical approaches and further standards work needed to enable that optimization.

In particular, the group looked at a variety of network capabilities – including caching, TCP optimization, signaling proxies, video rate adaption and compression and buffer management techniques – and how they could be used together to improve network performance.

Indeed, while a wide variety of vendors of late seem to be touting their own, individual network optimization solutions, the problem can’t be solved by one vendor or one network box. What ATIS has defined, instead, “are the things an operator needs to work on with a variety of different vendors to get things working. These are more complex, more involved end-to-end network optimizations that involve the interaction of more components of the network,” said Tom Anderson – Juniper-director mobility solutions, and a member of the network optimization focus group.

ATIS defined seven specific use cases that service providers could implement to help optimize their networks, including: Congestion Aware Fairness, Subscriber/Application Aware Network Optimization, Network Aware Scheduling of Content, User Rate Plans, Reasonable Network Protection and Management, Load and Policy Aware Multi-RAN Selection, and Optimizing Use of Wireless Non-Bearer Resources.

“The voice world is mature and pretty well understood in terms of how to engineer for voice traffic,” said Kevin Sparks, Alcatel-Lucent, director and corporate CTO. “Most of the optimization scenarios we discuss involve vast amount of Internet traffic, all in the same best-effort class. What you see is just a collision between all different sorts of users with peaks and valleys that are much more dynamic.”

In examining those use cases, it found a number of areas where it believes further standards work is needed including:

Congestion Awareness , or the ability to provide accurate and timely congestion indications from key congestion points in the network as triggers for dynamic network optimization.

Policy, in particular more standards-based way for PCRF (Policy and Charging Rules Function) engines to interface with other network and operational systems.

Traffic Detection, or functions that can classify traffic in-line and apply optimization enforcement actions selectively to the various classified traffic flows.

New Application/Network Interfaces, for example an API that would link M2M networks and devices/applications to minimize the massive signaling impact of large-scale M2M deployments.

Access Selection, specifically better coordination of network conditions with policy and charging control subscriber policies.

Another outcome of the report was recommendations for how standards groups, including ATIS itself along with 3GPP, OMA and IETF, could drive forward work that would support network optimization improvements.

A copy of the report is available here. A webinar detailing the report and its findings is also available.