Quality of service in wireless telecommunications depends on how all of the network elements work together in a live network to transmit the data to the handset and ensure the user’s quality of experience.
EXFO offers a variety of products and solutions to help guarantee QoE and QoS, including R&D and manufacturing testing, field network testing and quality of service assessments for mobile networks, service assurance, metro/core networks and FTTx access networks.
Solutions like the ones offered by EXFO (News - Alert) help companies stay on top of any issues businesses encounter that they might oversee, and therefore lead to loss of subscribers. Challenges with legacy network interoperability include managing handovers across different networks, while providing services outside the actual evolved packet core (EPC). Interoperability testing will be essential in order to verify that the quality of the applications meets the expectations of the end-user for seamless connectivity and high performance.
Businesses need a professional testing solution that enables constant troubleshooting of the live network to clearly see end-to-end signaling, as well as correlated signaling and user-plane analysis. The testing focus must shift from the transmission and signaling plane to the user plane and to applications, all requiring a deep view and the ability to follow elements and services.
When choosing a solution, operators need to decide which combination of the multiple technologies they wish to test, they need to consider what volumes of new phones with new applications are forecasted to connect to their network, and they need to consider their testing scenarios and required test equipment.
Application QoS is related to services such as speech and data traffic, and network QoS shows the network service by following the transmissions and management of network resources as agreed in the service level agreement. Between the two of these, the QoE can easily be understood by how the user applications and the network work together.
When monitoring QoE, three main elements that need to be considered are data acquisition, data correlation and data visualization. The ideal system needs to have the latest interfaces and performance to effectively process all the traffic captured on the network. Data correlation must be done at multiple levels and data must be gathered from multiple network interfaces at the same time.
EXFO’s BrixHawk service assurance solution assures quality of service for mobile providers and interoperability between transport technologies and multivendor equipment. It meets all demands for measuring QoE in real-time and has the power to give visibility to the subscriber’s QoE in a multi-technology environment. This is made possible via the control-plane analysis correlated with the user-plan analysis that utilizes an embedded deep packet inspection technology.
Edited by Jamie Epstein