Mobile Network Monitoring Capability for Femtocells
Mobile Network Monitoring Capability for Femtocells
1st July, 2009
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Europe : Tektronix Communications announced its femtocell monitoring solution based upon the industry-leading GeoProbe network monitoring platform.
Tektronix Communications’ GeoProbe Femtocell solution provides real time, end-to-end network visibility and trouble-shooting capability for operators deploying femtocell access networks alongside their UTRAN mobile access networks. Adoption of femtocell networks is projected to continue into 4G as the need increases for more cost-efficient capacity and bandwidth growth. As part of the Unified Assurance portfolio, the GeoProbe platform of monitoring solutions will support the 3GPP release 8 standard and vendor proprietary versions of the femtocell interfaces.
Femtocell networks rely on a new architecture that leverages existing 3G network elements (MSC, SGSN) but also includes new network interfaces (Iuh) and new network elements (HNB, HNB-GW, Security-GW, etc.) that are unproven in a mobile network environment where the expectations for quality are very high. For operators deploying femtocell networks, this represents a significant quality assurance risk, especially given the fact that the HNB located at the customer premise will be exposed to external factors unforeseen by traditional network elements that are typically housed at the central office or in a secure location.
“Tektronix Communications’ femtocell monitoring solution enables operators adopting femtocells to ensure the same level of QoS in their femtocell networks as they have come to expect in their mobile networks; i.e. the ability to monitor and troubleshoot customer impacting problems all the way to the femto home node B”, said Mark Driedger, vice president and general manager of Network Monitoring for Tektronix Communications. “In addition, operators now have the flexibility to scale their network monitoring needs as they adopt new broadband technologies such as HSPA and LTE.”
Because the number of network elements involved in a femtocell access network are considerably more than in a GSM or UMTS access network, there is an economic need to monitor the potentially tens of thousands of Iuh interfaces remotely rather than relying on portable tests performed by field technicians, which can be considerably more expensive and less efficient.
Tektronix Communications’ femtocell monitoring solution enables operators a smooth transition to next generation networks. The solution can generate statistics for nodal troubleshooting, network baselining and planning purposes, as well as data records for internal and external BSS and OSS applications.
About Tektronix Communications’ Unified Assurance Portfolio
Tektronix Communications’ industry-leading Unified Assurance (UA) network management suite provides integrated, end-to-end performance monitoring solutions for customer, service and network assurance. UA supports a full range of monitoring capabilities across next generation mobile and IP networks, including active test solutions that provide active troubleshooting, provisioning and automated service quality monitoring. Tektronix Communications solutions quickly identify, localize and quantify service and network issues, giving customers an integrated, end-to-end next generation network.
The GeoProbe product provides network engineers with the information needed to solve network and service problems across technologies, applications and element vendors. APM (Tektronix Communications’ unified assurance for converged networks platform) enables engineers to manage network services by associating network events into functional groups for more focused and effective troubleshooting. More information can be found at: www.tektronix.com/networkmanagement.