 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific II 2013 |
| Article no.: | 8 | |
| Topic: | Solutions for the mobile data crunch | |
| Author: | Danny Frydman | |
| Title: | CTO & VP Customer Care | |
| Organisation: | Saguna Networks | |
| PDF size: | 400KB |
About author
Danny Frydman is a founder at Saguna Networks and serves as the company’s CTO & VP of Customer Care; he has over 20 years of experience defining and developing complex products in different fields, including telecom, cellular, multimedia processing, routing, medical and military. Previously, Mr. Frydman held the position of VP of R&D at Surf communications. Prior to that, he served as a Director of Technologies at Charlotte’s Web Networks. His experience also includes cellular (Qualcomm Ltd.), medical (Elscint Ltd.) and military (Elbit Ltd.)
Danny Frydman holds a B.S.c in Electrical engineering, from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.
Article abstract
The rapid growth of smartphones and tablets has created an enormous demand for multimedia applications for everything from entertainment, to education, news, healthcare, social media and more. In the Asia Pacific, mobile data grew 95 per cent in 2012 alone. Mobile network operators are grappling with the cost of upgrading their networks to meet the demand at a time when competition is forcing them to lower prices, so they are turning to innovative, relatively low-cost, technology to rationalize network traffic.
Full Article
The massive adoption of smartphones has led to a huge demand for multimedia applications that serve both individuals and organizations, in an endless variety of fields – including education, healthcare, entertainment and human social interaction. In Asia Pacific, for example, mobile data traffic grew at a rate of 95 per cent in 2012, a near-doubling of traffic.
Mobile networks have continuously evolved to handle a growing volume demands by increasing the access and core network’s traffic capacity and by better utilizing those networks. Currently, optimization of network architectures, overhead reduction and network simplification pose challenges to standardization bodies, mobile operators, vendors and manufacturers. All aim to constantly provide solutions to satisfy the flood of bandwidth-hungry users and applications.
Today, in spite of all the efforts and innovations, the MNOs face a mobile data crunch. A ‘mobile data crunch’ or ‘capacity crunch’ is the result of the ever-growing demand for data capacity by mobile users. Solving this problem has become the primary challenge of MNOs today.
This paper discusses this challenge, and offers far-reaching solutions that go beyond capacity build-outs and optimized utilization.
Crunch point
The trend is clear – an increasing number of mobile users are using devices that enable consumption of large amounts of data, mainly video content. The volume of data is increasing much faster than the mobile network can support. Cisco, in its recent Visual Networking Index (VNI), predicts that the volume of global mobile data traffic in 2017 will be 13 times that of 2012 levels, mostly due to the growing number of end users owning devices that can generate much more traffic, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. In the APAC region, by the end of 2013, over half of the mobile devices will be smartphones. The telecommunications consultant Analysys Mason forecasts rapid growth of this percentage in the next five years and expects that 84 per cent of handsets will be smartphones by 2017.
Applications on the mobile network should work quickly and efficiently, without compromising quality and in a way that will allow all parties to benefit from communications innovations; end users, operators, and the whole industry’s economics.
End users employ a growing number of multimedia applications that require huge network capacity and an uncompromising Quality of Experience (QoE) – dictating high-resolution video streaming capabilities and low delay at a reduced cost.
MNOs must satisfy these requirements while making efforts to build their customer base, expand their revenues, and maintain their profitability despite the growing competition.
Common practices
There are two directions MNOs are taking to try and overcome the crunch – increase mobile network capacity or utilize the network better.
Increasing mobile network capacity – one or more of the following methods can increase mobile network capacity:
• Giving the mobile network more processing power
• Increasing the allocated spectrum
• Migrating to advanced networks, such as LTE
• Implementing small cells
• Adopting offloading paradigms (e.g. WiFi offloading)
Increasing mobile network capacity is expensive and may not ensure a reasonable return on investment. MNO Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and Operating Expenses (OPEX) increase per Giga Byte (GB) consumed, but revenue per GB is declining due to competition between the MNOs.
This puts the MNO’s data-service profitability at risk, eventually affecting the level of services that mobile users receive.
Network utilization – Techniques for better utilizing existing network resources include:
• Transcoding the video and reducing the amount of data needed to transmit it
• Sending only a portion of the video at first and sending the rest upon request
• Proving better user experience only to ‘premium’ customers that pay for this service
Transcoding and transrating video streams can adversely affect the user experience by reducing video quality and affecting QoE. This, in turn, results in a demand for additional computing power for the transcoding /transrating process that increases the OPEX and CAPEX as well. Obviously, providing lower bandwidth to non-premium users degrades the QoE of those users.
Beyond common solutions
Capacity is continuously being added, while on the other hand, revenues are dropping. Increasing capacity alone is not sufficient and puts financial goals at risk. Compression does not contribute to the users’ QoE.
So what practical steps can MNOs take to achieve the desired result?
Optimal solutions exist that will benefit both mobile operators and their users. These solutions provide elegant ways to increase network capacity at minimal additional cost to the MNO, while at the same time improving user experience and satisfaction levels.
Taking into account the fact that many users generally are consuming the same content simultaneously, a content acceleration and caching solution for mobile RAN (radio access network) can help achieve these results. A RAN-based solution can significantly reduce data loads over the mobile backhaul and improve the efficiency of the radio interface. Content and DNS (domain name system) caching, and capacity management technologies are able to substantially improve MNO economics and transparently create a new level of service delivery and user quality-of-experience. The RAN-based solution – a ‘holistic’ solution that can move the crunch point away from the MNOs – can include any combination of the following:
RAN aware video optimization – Mobile data services can be configured to optimise video delivery. When application awareness exists for each flow going over the network, it is possible, when network and cell/eNodeB congestion occurs, to prioritize the different flows, throttling flows carrying applications with low Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This frees bandwidth for the applications that require high QoS levels, such as video flows. The quality observed by users when viewing video has a dramatic influence on the quality of experience they perceive.
By understanding the mobile users’ video consumption habits, of and relating these habits to the maximum bandwidths they need for each type of usage, networks can be managed and utilized more efficiently .
Caching – A RAN-based solution will often make use of content and DNS caching. These solutions must support mobility and must be transparent to both mobile network charging and lawful interception (LI) solutions.
• Content caching within the RAN saves backhaul and peering-link traffic. These traffic saving capabilities dramatically reduce the MNO’s OPEX and CAPEX and offer faster ROI (return on investment).
• DNS caching, when implemented in the RAN, dramatically accelerates the loading of Web pages because DNS queries are answered much faster, improving the perceived user experience.
Taking advantage of the DNS servers that implement DNS caching, additional applications can be provided including location services and RAN-aware video delivery. By offering these capabilities to third party content providers and ad agencies, MNOs can create additional monetization sources.
Content delivery network (CDN) acceleration – The RAN can provide CDN acceleration functionality directly, reducing bandwidth requirements, traffic load, and dramatically improve response times and the user’s experience, while providing new revenue streams to the MNO.
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