Sunday, October 17, 2010

Relevance of Policy Server to Mobile Networks

The upsurge of social application on mobile phones, and proliferation of multi media services has created a strain on the mobile network to deliver these services to customers at a required quality of experience. The mobile traffic has increased exponentially and disproportianately compared to the increase in the customer base, thus requiring major investment in capacity and infrastructure (CAPEX). This has in turn eroded into service provider margins. The recent issues in AT&T who are solely delivering 3G services for iPhone customers is a case in point.

These experiences has necessitated mobile providers to rethin their network operational strategy. At central in this would be the service providers requirement to address performance management at the RAN, IP-NW, Transport and Application level. However a 3G provider who buys IP access/transport from another network would have a daunting task in achieving this. Notwithstanding this fact, the providers requirement would be to have Performance Management Systems that integrate with the above mentioned elements to ascertain whether they meet the required KPI's and feed such information to PCRF and Polcy Servers. This action would enable mitigatory steps for optimized 3G channel management, Intelligent load balancing of data traffic to determine traffic management directions/traffic offload, and offload of traffic from 3G to WiFi depending on the customer location. In my analysis Tekelec works in this space

Another important element in the context of mobile internet delivery is what is described as Mobile Internet Gateway. This device which is well integrated to the Policy Servers, enable application delivery optimization on a per App level, Ad-insertion re-purposing and traffic policing and shaping. Some of the products which are provided in this space are by ByteMobile, Openwave, Comverse and Flash Networks. These in most respects achieve the enforcement part in the PCEF functionality.

The Subscribe Data Management functionality forms an integral part in profiling services to customers/subscribers. This has relevance in looking at the attributes in service top up, service enablement, service feature management. What would typically be in this case is an LDAP repositry slaved off the IT/Billing system master, and in instances for green field operators is an HSS providing IFC service definition criterion. The SDM would integrate with the Policy Servers/PCRF to deploy the policies at the PCEF from a per subscriber perspective.

In looking at this, it appears that the dynamism in 3G traffic managementis is highly unpredicateble, and can be influenced by so many factors such as demand for certain killer apps, location and event specific situations, social and demographic conditions. Also for countries where the network is diverse a renewed operational model may need to be looked at where different networks (players) look at a certain niche of the functionality (eg. transport/access/policing and service management) on a well sounded managed service model. With the degree of virtualization at the service and network level this could be a stark reality!!!