Openet: Get Ready for Mother's Day (or: Predictive Congestion Management)

 

A new whitepaper from Openet may help mobile operators to intelligently solve mobile access congestion.

The document, "Predictive Congestion Management – Improving subscriber quality of experience by intelligently addressing the causes of RAN congestion", is available for download from Lightreading site,  here (registration required).

Openet summarizes their solution to the problem as follows:

"Only Openet’s solution goes beyond point solutions that offer “just” policy management, or “just” invoking DPI policies, or “just” quota management. Unlike RAN congestion solutions from equipment suppliers, or probes that cannot always inspect RAN backhaul traffic, the Openet solution is designed to help operators reduce investments in infrastructure. By predicting and managing congestion, operators can improve the QoE for the greater whole of customers in a proactive manner. Unlike trigger-based solutions that address network bottlenecks reactively, Openet brings to the table a proactive solution that minimizes the complexity and costs of managing congestion “before” it occurs."

"Predictive" means that "the solution analyzes previous network activity (historical data) and projects what the network will do (trending data) based not only on straightforward trending, but also by considering “calendar events” (e.g., Mother’s Day or special sporting events), as well as seasonality and the effect of recent changes to a network"

 

"Managing Congestion" is done "Through interaction with policy control enforcement functions, certain enforcement actions can take place, such as:

• QoS controls—increasing or decreasing the Kbps and priority of sessions or services on the uplink or downlink separately;
   
• Blocking of traffic—block session or services as instructed by PCRF;Blocking of traffic—block session or services as instructed by PCRF;
   
• Redirection of traffic—manipulate IP packets to redirect specific services such as HTTP to landing pages/portals"