The Mobile Momentum: How Can Carriers Manage Increasing Traffic in the Mobile Space?
As their revenues decline and mobile carriers continue to struggle with the increasing traffic demand from their customers, Long Term Evolution (LTE) looks like a good candidate to reduce the cost per bit. I recently read a nice analysis from Deloitte that claims that 2013 will be a strong year for LTE adoption, predicting that more than 200 operators in 75 countries will launch LTE networks alongside their existing HSxPA networks. With a diverse range of LTE handsets and tablets available in the consumer market, overall LTE subscription is expected to exceed 200 million clients.
LTE, also known as mobile network 4th generation (4G), provides a solid infrastructure to deliver advanced, content-rich applications in real-time. Although most of the content will be provided via Over The Top (OTT) content providers, the operators should still employ dynamic, intelligent and user-aware transparent traffic steering engine, in order to differentiate their customers services while improving user Quality of Experience (QoE).
So how can carriers manage the increasing traffic in the mobile space? Radware’s approach to addressing these needs is based on introducing an Application Provider Edge (Application-PE) that provides an application-level demarcation point in the mobile framework. This allows mobile operators to facilitate these evolving challenges while embracing LTE technology. Radware’s Application-PE optimizes, accelerates and secures both the mobile operator control plane (handling the signaling storm from customers and network elements) and the data plane (optimization and smart steering technologies). In addition, it can scale on demand to support more mobile services as well as increasing mobile requests and traffic.
From a data-plane viewpoint, Radware’s Application-PE enables adaptable, intelligent mobile service delivery via:
Transparent traffic steering – efficiently routing mobile requests to a specific set of network services/elements
User-awareness – allowing for decisions based on actual mobile user characteristics
ADC policy scripting with AppShape++ – that works to refine mobile service scenarios
In addition, Application-PE delivers mobile optimization via content acceleration algorithms (such as Hybla and Westwood), Radware FastView™ Web Performance Optimization (WPO) technology and Application Performance Monitoring (APM), which ensures mobile service SLA and more.
From a control-plane viewpoint, Radware’s Application-PE provides optimization for signaling protocols via high-availability, load distribution, disaster recovery (DR) and connection multiplexing for Diameter, SIP and other control-plane protocols. That way, along with optimizing mobile service delivery, the core mobile infrastructure is efficiently utilized for additional cost reduction.
What’s next? While there are several new initiatives in the mobile arena, the one which really stands out is the move towards mobile cloud services. Radware’s solution enables elastic mobile network infrastructure and cloud services by natively integrating into mobile ecosystems including Telco Software Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow as part of the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) initiative. As a result, a more flexible, simplified logical network management will be available, allowing for further cost reduction.
