The GSM network of China Mobile is the largest mobile network in a global context, with a use base of over 200 million. The conventional 2G network construction model achieves its network value in voice service. It is hard to bear the future-oriented new services. The legacy investment cannot be protected properly. China Mobile is keen in seeking new service increase points. China Mobile intends to construct rapidly, by addressing the future-oriented development requirements, a unified, reliable, efficient and qualify ideal infrastructure bearer network. Such an ideal network is applied to bear the inter-provincial 17951 long-distance voice, key account VPN dedicated line, future 3G and IMS, and other new telecom services. That is an important decision and measure taken by China Mobile in its network transition. After long exploration, China Mobile selected, in a decisive manner, the future-oriented all-IP bearer technology as the technical development direction.
"The Unbearable" in the Age of IP Bearer Network
IP bearer network is a telecom network based on IP technology. As a product in the evolution of the IP age, the IP bearer network integrates the conventional telecom network and the IP technology. It boasts both the flexibility of the Internet and the high stability, high reliability and manageability of the telecom network. It can bear a full line of services, including voice, data and video multimedia. It provides the same QoS as that of the conventional telecom network and has a value-added value chain.
No doubt, the coin has two sides. China Mobile has made painstaking efforts in constructing two phases of IP bearer network. It enjoys the benefits brought about the IP bearer network, and at the same time, is also exposed to the impact related to performance and traffic caused by the IP bearer network. The problems afore-mentioned, if not addressed properly, will gradually eat up the gained benefits of the IP bearer network. The quality issue of the IP bearer network becomes "the unbearable" in the IP age. In that respect, China Mobile is committed to constructing an "ideal bearer network" that can always bear customer services at a high QoS level and provide unified service experience to the customer. Such a commitment is an important goal of China Mobile in constructing the IP bearer network.
Performance Monitoring Bears the Beauty of the Bearer
Performance monitoring as solution
Internet applications do not need to know about the real-time resources of the IP network. For the Internet services, the IP network can be opaque. However, for the telecom service, voice, video, NGN and 3G service, the current available network resources must be known. The IP network is required to be transparent. The gradual "close coupling" of service and network challenges the operability of the IP network.
In particular, QoS is the most outstanding issue. As an important measuring index of network operation quality, QoS must be guaranteed by the quality IP bearer network of China Mobile. The IP network features good average performance and bad transient performance. As a result, the traffic on the IP network is strong burst traffic and is not be predictable. The guarantee of IP-based QoS cannot be addressed properly. In addition to QoS, such bearer network related issues as resource management (for example, hardware resource and service resource), data management (for example, performance data and performance threshold), report management (for example, resource report, performance report, fault report, and statistics information and details) and large-scale deployment are issues for discussion by the experts of China Mobile.
Based on in-depth analysis, the experts quickly made a conclusion. China Mobile shall construct, based on performance, a resource and performance monitoring system that complies with the characteristics of the IP bearer network. The said monitoring system will escort the safe operation of the IP bearer network of China Mobile. The experts believe that reasonable network resource configuration is an important precondition to address the QoS issue of the IP bearer network. The configuration includes the processing capability of the IP network node equipment and port resource distribution. On that basis, bandwidth prediction will be performed for the services. A traffic model and distribution model are constructed by borrowing the experience of the conventional telecom network, and accordingly, take bandwidth reservation measures. At the same time, during service deployment, dynamic performance monitoring shall be undertaken for the networkwide resources. The monitoring information shall be collected, analyzed and reported to guide network capacity expansion or re-optimization, and improve the bearer service quality.
Performance monitoring brings about beauty of the bearer network
To address the issues afore-mentioned, China Mobile deploys an IP network performance monitoring solution, challenging the performance problems based on IP bearer. It tries to construct a unified resource and performance monitoring system, and provide a basis for resource scheduling and service deployment. The said solution is provided by Huawei Technologies. It helps China Mobile to successfully monitor the performance and efficiency in an all-round, efficient and continuous manner. It protects the inherent interest of the IP bearer network of China Mobile, significantly reducing the operation and maintenance cost of the IP bearer network of China Mobile. The diverse internal requirements generated by IP-based bearer of China Mobile are satisfied. The solution provides the following benefits to the IP bearer network of China Mobile.
- The multi-layer performance monitoring facilitates China Mobile to know about the performance of the bearer network completely.
Device-level equipment monitoring is the very root of service quality. The operation and maintenance personnel of China Mobile can easily and conveniently know about the operation health of the equipment through monitoring of the CPU utilization of the main control board and service boards, and the load of the memory, and through setting of the performance threshold alarm.
The link-level monitoring provides the long-term monitoring and statistics function of the link incoming/outgoing traffic, incoming/outgoing bandwidth utilization (average value and peak value), link fault rate and other index. This level of monitoring helps the operation and maintenance personnel of China Mobile to accumulate related experience in network traffic. It also helps them to pre-judge the traffic peak value before public holidays and vacation, and take related preventive measures.
The path-level monitoring can collect statistics of the delay, delay jitter, packet loss rate and other performance parameters between any two Trunk Media Gateways (TMGs). In that way, this level of monitoring provides powerful, diverse and real-time monitoring data to the deployment of voice, video and data services, and signaling bearer of China Mobile.
- The distributed deployment capability can adapt to the capacity expansion requirements brought about by the future network development of China Mobile. In addition, during the future network capacity expansion, the distributed deployment of probe servers can avoid repeated investment in server hardware by China Mobile. As a result, it effectively protects the investment of China Mobile and reduces CapEx.
- The 7 * 24 continuous, stable performance monitoring satisfies the requirements of around-the-clock network performance monitoring of China Mobile.
- The customized equipment performance report, link performance report and path SLA report help to improve the operation and maintenance analysis capability of China Mobile.
- The settable threshold facilitates the operation and maintenance personnel of China Mobile to set reasonable thresholds according to the current network status, avoiding mistaken alarming. Performance threshold alarm helps the operation and maintenance personnel of China Mobile to know about network abnormality in time, and take preventive measures.
- The performance trend analysis can display the incoming/outgoing traffic on the link, implement the automatic refreshing of images and browse the alarm data in a synchronous way. It provides a direct and visual performance trend analysis images to the operation and maintenance personnel of China Mobile.
- The provisioning of resource inventory details report and resource statistics report helps China Mobile to implement precise report management. It assists China Mobile in conducting in-depth exploration of data, and applies the data in service-related analysis and expansion.
During the operation of the IP bearer network, China Mobile tests the QoS indexes of the network. The rest result shows that the delay jitter of the entire IP bearer network is less than 5ms, the packet loss rate is less than 0.1%, the voice call quality is close to the conventional PSTN, with a clear voice quality, and the call completion rate is higher than the former convergence network. The QoS capability complies completely with the requirements on bearer network that bears voice, signaling and other carrier-class services.
With in-depth bearer capability, the IP bearer network of China Mobile brings about beauty of the bearer network.
Leader of the Age of Ideal IP Bearer Network
The construction process of the IP bearer network of China Mobile is a continuous escalating process of non-stop progress, broad exploration, innovative expansion and self surpassing. It will eventually lead China Mobile into a new age of IP bearer network.
IP bearer is a new research subject. With the continuous deepening of service operation, the degree of coupling of IP telecom network and the telecom services borne will be higher and higher. In this context, a wide spectrum of requirements on equipment is raised by the operators. Meanwhile, new technologies keep occurring. They have far out-numbered the actual needs of the operators. Only the technologies that can satisfy service requirements and customer requirements can be of the highest value.
In the perspective of continuous value creation, the construction of the IP bearer network is not a simple selection of equipment or suppliers. More importantly, it is the selection of strategic cooperative partners. Those equipment vendors who have a deep understanding of telecom services, strong innovation capability, and capability of responding to the operators in time and effectively the total cost ownership (TCO) of the operators can become the potential strategic partners.
