NGMN Launches Mobile Content Delivery Optimization Activity

NGMN Alliance announced the "launch of four new project activities highlighting the NGMN Alliance’s commitment to further enhance next generation networks and to guide the industry with its recommendations. The following four new NGMN projects will determine the focus of the NGMN Alliance for the next 12 months:

• Next Generation Converged Operations Requirements .. 
• Evolution of the Radio Access Network (RAN) 
• Mobile Content Delivery Optimisation - The project Mobile Content Delivery Optimisation will evaluate mobile network enhancements for the optimised delivery of content. The project aims to define use cases for Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and to develop related requirements. Furthermore, recommendations will be provided with regards to content delivery architecture options and CDN functionalities (like e.g. caching, media adaptation).
• Deployment and Operation of Small Cells

Dr. Peter Meissner (pictured), NGMN Operating Officer, emphasised that the new work programme reflects the current and future high-priority industry challenges as highlighted by the NGMN Partners. “The NGMN Alliance is happy to continue the development of Mobile Broadband for the benefit of the end-customer.”

See "NGMN Alliance Pushes for New Work Programme" - here.

Resource: Guidelines for LTE Backhaul Traffic Estimation [NGMN]

 
A white paper by the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance, describes a "A model is developed to predict traffic levels in transport networks used to backhaul LTE eNodeBs. Backhaul traffic is made up of a number of different components of which user plane data is the largest, comprising around 80-90% of overall traffic, slightly less when IPsec encryption is added. The remainder consists of the transport protocol overhead and traffic forwarding to another base-station during handover. Network signalling, management and synchronisation were assumed to be negligible".

"Figure 13 shows transport provisioning curves for the ‘vanilla’ LTE with 2x2 downlink and 1x2 uplink configurations for both 10MHz and 20MHz system bandwidths. X-axis scales are given for both tricell and single cell eNodeBs. Provisioning curves for other eNodeB configurations are given in the report. IPsec encryption would increase these provisioning figures by 14%. Curves in Figure 13 represent a general case for fully loaded eNodeBs. Actual traffic levels for individual eNodeBs may vary about these levels depending on the deployment scenario and loading level"

"Overall, this study shows that although LTE is capable of generating some very high peak rates, when the traffic of multiple cells and/or eNodeBs are aggregated together, the transport provisioning requirements are quite reasonable".

See "Guidelines for LTE Backhaul Traffic Estimation" - here.