Matchmaking in Monitoring

As networks evolve, they'll need to be partnered by monitoring systems that can meet their needs.

A 3G network, based on cdma2000 or another packet-based standard. I still enjoy traditional voice, e-mail, and paging, but am experimenting with broadband streaming video, wireless Internet or location-based services.

A single, dependable network-monitoring system that can keep me focused and healthy in all my moods, not break my wallet, and not get overly jealous if you catch me talking to a different standard. Looking for a long-term relationship? Call me!

This hypothetical personal ad is one that network-services execs all over the wireless industry are placing. They're choosy, but they have to be. Expectations placed on network-monitoring systems in an age of convergence are high. "Settling" is not an option.

Something Old The monitoring system must not abandon its traditional roles. Blocks and drops are still the "Holy Grail" of performance standards, according to LaMont Eanes, Sprint PCS vice president of network services. However, aside from merely keeping count, a robust system should be able to provide correlation and tracking information that its predecessors perhaps could not. An intelligent monitoring system can correlate service problems with certain types of handsets, often revealing that a service issue is not resident in the network itself. Also, by dividing each tower into three sectors, the Sprint PCS system allows engineers to identify and correlate higher rates of drops and blocks to specific geographic areas and respond to them accordingly.

The network operations center must serve as traffic cop and road crew. A stable of flashy new services only increases carriers' emphasis on vigilant awareness of effective signaling and switching, as well as constant surveillance for breakdowns. Transparency to the consumer is always the desired end result of effective monitoring.

"I want to always be able to access the Internet, or be able to have calls over the Internet or over my traditional network," said Stephanie Brandao, Alcatel media relations manager. "I want to be able to have instant, reliable service at a price I can afford. I really don't care how you do that."

Ideally, of course, problems will be corrected before they're ever noticed by end users, but an observant alarm system still can be beneficial in dealing directly with consumers. According to Steve Zishka, Rural Cellular director of network operations, "If a customer calls in and says, `Hey, I'm having a problem in this area,' we can validate that complaint through our statistical analysis, or even by going back and seeing if we had an alarm in that area during the time that they were thinking there were problems. That always makes our customers feel better."

As in days gone (or going) by, the monitoring system must not be overly proprietary. Infrastructure vendors such as Alcatel are feeling pressure to build solutions, which account for a simple reality: Carriers may have dozens of partners providing network hardware and software.

"The purpose of standards is to have open platforms," Brandao said. "We're striving to have all of our platforms be open. You're just seeing that everyone is feeling the pressure to go away from proprietary solutions. That will drive how quickly all these new services, networks, wireless applications get deployed."

Although the rush is on to convert infrastructure (and consumers) to flashier standards, the simple fact remains that huge areas in North America likely will be serviced by older wireless technologies for the foreseeable future. Network-monitoring systems must be backwards-compatible and multifunctional. Carriers need monitoring systems that can communicate seamlessly with today's and tomorrow's protocols.

"The end users don't change as quickly as the equipment manufacturers and the service providers do," Brandao said. "There's a delicate balance."

Something New In addition to extending and sharpening its current responsibilities, the next-generation monitoring system will have some new duties. As networks move toward packet-data standards, streaming video, and/or broadband wireless, the monitoring system will need to manage quality end-to-end. Carriers will be expected to be able to determine where the problems are occurring for their packet-data-based services, according to Michelle French, Ericsson spokesperson.

Usage forecasting, often predictable over a voice network, will present new challenges as well.

"What's tough to interpret on the RF side for engineering is how much bandwidth is going to be used per user when you get into robust data applications," Sprint PCS' Eanes said. "We know exactly what a voice link is going to require, but data applications, depending on speed requirements, whether or not video's involved, whether or not there's color involved ... no one really knows what the bandwidth requirements are going to be. Our engineers are really going to have to go to school and determine what they're doing so that they can accurately forecast what requirements we're going to have to engineer into the network."

That unpredictability can present difficulties for engineers working to maintain consistent coverage.

"Imagine taking a tablecloth and shaking it out a few times, and then laying it on the ground," Eanes said. "It covers a given perimeter. If you go to the middle of that tablecloth and pick it up, the air under your hands represents usage. As you see more air representing usage, the perimeter shrinks."

High usage in concentrated areas, such as college football games, presents challenges. A well-designed, integrated network-monitoring system can reroute packet traffic intelligently through the IP cloud, maximizing coverage, and dealing with high concentrations of usage, while still providing transparency to users.

Ideally, the system also will position a carrier to offer new services and benefits to its customers. Ericsson's GPRS-based system will enable service levels, guaranteeing various levels of speed and capacity, and providing monitoring to insure that those obligations are met. It also will, according to French, have the flexibility to monitor other packet-data standards such as cdma2000.

An intelligent, next-generation network-management system will interact with the customer database to facilitate location-based services. To reach their full potential, these services may require handset upgrades, as well as the tacit consent of consumers to be passively located. Vendors and carriers, however, already are building databases that will track and share call data.

Service control points are service databases that track and share customer information necessary to provide services such as mobile number portability, voice mail, call authorization, or calling-card verification, according to Mike Gurley, Alcatel senior director of business development for signaling products.

"It's a very reliable architecture," he said, including multiple redundancies in switches and other transfer points.

Also, the monitoring/management system must serve as a filter, presenting only mission-critical alarms to busy humans.

"You need to have a fairly robust system to field all those messages, properly sort through them, and throw most of them away or store most of them in a holding tank to be looked at later," said Frank Schueneman, Alltel vice president of network operations. "A small percentage actually get displayed to a human being."

Given the emphasis on end-to-end quality control, this aspect of network monitoring will take on ever-greater importance as the data monitored and recorded by network engineers multiplies.

"The device that we have collects absolutely every piece of information that's flowing out of our different networks," Rural Cellular's Zishka said. "Every piece."

Finally, a 3G network-monitoring system will have to accomplish all of these tasks without being a drag on the bottom line. Carriers need a single, multifunctional system, which will monitor the health of all traffic flow on the network, rather than competing (and even redundant) systems, which monitor each individual function of the system separately. A convergent network requires a convergent network-monitoring system.

"You have to find a `box' that can look at all those different types of standards," Zishka said. "We put this system into place two or three years ago, and as I was going through the search for the system, what we found out is that it's very expensive to do that. It costs a lot of money to get something that will look at all these different types of standards."

"If you look at the service curve," said Brandao, "the life-cycle of some of these services - they depreciate, and the costs appreciate. (Carriers) can't make money unless they're constantly delivering new services, and they have to wean the consumers off of these old ones that they're comfortable with."

Likewise, carriers need a coherent monitoring system that can straddle the transition.

Something Borrowed, Something Blue As vendors and carriers make the transition to packet-based standards, their clients expect a wide range of new services to follow. Companies looking to build on the opportunities presented by wireless broadband, streaming video or Bluetooth will have a challenge on their hands in creating a monitoring infrastructure, which won't quickly grow unmanageable, both in terms of cost and complexity.

Although some will go it alone, most will choose to form partnerships to find the hardware and software needed to keep the monitoring and management system from becoming a beast unto itself. Ericsson has enlisted more than 50 partners in building a packet-based architecture, according to Per-Erik Gustafsson, Ericsson director of strategic offering.

"We use an open architecture, which is providing us with an ability to mix the `best in class' as far as network elements (are concerned)," said Mary Allmaras, Qwest vice president of network engineering. "It provides us the opportunity to maintain a low-cost network architecture. It also provides us flexibility, allowing us to introduce new services and features very quickly."

Resourceful, hard-working engineers are then able to customize those elements to meet the unique needs of the company, a task which grows in importance and complexity with every passing day.

Whatever the individual strategies, for the marriage of packet-based wireless networking and unified monitoring infrastructure, the end result is clear: Love and acceptance for those that get it right; rejection and heartache for those that don't.