Brochure

VIAVINITRO Mobile Coverage Assurance Solution

Solving Industry Challenges

The explosion of wireless communications and data usage across the globe in recent years has created a challenging environment for cellular service providers through the sheer volume and complexity of traffic and information sources from which to gather useful network performance insights. Service providers are not only providers of their own digital products and cellular services, but also enablers for other sectors, by providing the essential connectivity infrastructure for functioning and growing in a digital economy, which results in a growing demand for broadband access. New cellular technologies such as 5G, IoT, and infrastructures are fueling the transformation of the communications industry, but its full value can only be delivered when adequate performance insights across the network elements of the RAN and Core seamlessly connects that data and enables its exchange—anytime and anywhere. It is crucial to have a an agnostic vendor network view across the RAN and Core infrastructures to address any verity of performance related use cases for subscriber and network assessment and reporting.

NITRO Mobile

The heart of the VIAVI Coverage Assurance solution is the Network Integrated Test, Real-time analytics and Optimization (NITRO) Mobile platform, the only subscriber-centric location intelligence, assurance and optimization solution proven to deliver carrier grade performance and scale needed to meet operators’ growing demands with typical systems handling several billion connections per day. The NITRO Mobile platform has the scale and virtualized architecture to meet ever-growing data capacity demands

Features y Single dashboard that summarizes RAN and Core performance

y Maps allowing the display of a country, region, city or district of interest. Toggle between 2D and 3D views

y Network Filter to allow choice of RAN, Core, or both to populate the analysis

y Technology Filter – 5G, 4G, 3G y Node Metrics Filter – 5G, 4G, 3G, data, voice, and associated RAN and Core scores such as NPS, Site Verification Score, Accessibility, Retainability, Mobility, Integrity and more!

y Node Search and Node Usage Filter y View RF Rasters in 3D y Filter on Raster Usage and Frequency Band y Generate and View Site Verification Reports y Threshold categories to display (Critical, Critical and Major, Critical, Major, and Minor)

y Pico, Micro, Macro, DAS, Femto, and Repeater cell types supported

Benefits y Reduce Site deployment time and expense y Assure all critical voice and data services with the same end to end visibility

y Gain operational efficiencies from unified RAN and Core insights

y Investment protection for 4G and 5G y Manage service issues rapidly y Quickly identify priority sites that meet QoS expectations for subscriber class, location, and service type

y Evaluate coverage and capacity in context of subscriber experience expectations

y Create reports to automate the routine analysis of performance, quality, and mobility key performance indicators (KPIs), thus requiring less operational work

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while supporting the widest array of infrastructure vendors and cellular technologies in the industry: GSM, UMTS, LTE, cellular IoT, and 5G. A key feature of the multi-technology support is that the data is available in a single unified data structure, combining RAN and Core, and enabling external feeds and NITRO Mobile applications to be truly subscriber-centric, enabling analytics that span technology layers, representing the complete subscriber experience regardless of the access technology in use at the time.

RAN2Core Assurance

Often times service providers monitor the RAN and the Core performance independently, since they usually rely on different sets of metrics and are backed up by different teams of experts. Coverage Assurance is a converged assurance application delivered as part of the NITRO Mobile portfolio which provides the combination of RAN and Core monitoring data into a single dashboard, reports, and workflows. The workflows rely on different types of intuitive views: maps, tables, scores, thresholds, and KPI breakdowns. All views are manipulating data in consistent way; meaning that RF measurements, along with measurements related to mobile devices, are brought together with core measurements that are directly related. Views are enhanced to allow better understanding of individual cell performance.

NITRO Mobile Platform

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Introducing Coverage Assurance

Coverage Assurance is an application delivered as part of the NITRO Mobile portfolio of applications. Its main purpose is to complement NITRO Mobile with easy to use converged RAN and Core workflows. All Coverage Assurance views display metrics results in different representational forms, such as maps, tables, individual, or collection of KPIs. Metrics can be split into two categories: KPIs and scores. KPIs are calculated using network raw parameters based on defined formulas. A “score” is a 1 to 5 scaled indicator based on averaging a collection of KPIs with different configurable weightings. While KPIs can be associated to either one of the Core or RAN network, scores can contain a combination of these KPIs. A three-level threshold system is associated to each metric. Each metric value can fall under one of four threshold evaluation ranges: good, minor, major, or critical. Accordingly, a status color is associated to each metric value and made visible in all views and panels whenever a measurement is involved.

NITRO Mobile Portfolio

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Use Cases

Service providers investments in the RAN are typically made when introducing new geographic coverage area or to correct a negative impact within a location that may be having adverse effects on subscribers’ experiences. Network operation teams utilizing both RAN performance and planning measurements related to mobile devices can be brought together with core measurements that are directly related to the network sites’ overall performance leading to rapid issue resolution. This allows service providers to reduce OPEX and achieve more value from CAPEX with performance insights from both RAN and Core simultaneously unified in one workflow to address various use cases.

Whether it’s coverage, reliability, or speed, NITRO Mobile Coverage Assurance allows searches by various levels of detail across the network. The Map View delivers the map of a geographical area on top of which different network data layers are displayed. Analyze entire network views, regional views, city and street views, and toggle to 3D building-level views as needed based on preference.

Coverage Assurance Map View

Coverage Assurance Map View with scores: zoomed to reveal cell topology, types, frequencies ‒ workflow focus areas highlighted

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Coverage Assurance Map 3-dimensional view of 2-dimensional coverage data

Service Provider engineering and network operations team members within service providers are responsible for troubleshooting end-to-end issues on an ever-changing network. Often these roles consist of a combination of working directly on devices, observing and interpreting data from multiple tools, and coordinating with other internal and external teams towards resolution, taking significant time. Often there is a need to decrease process flows or introduction of new tools.

Coverage Assurance collects and analyzes monitoring data for performance monitoring-based workflows to enable research and understanding of end-to-end network coverage. The views provided by Coverage Assurance enable quick identification, through color codes, as to what areas might need immediate attention or to provide visibility into the best coverage areas. Coverage Assurance supports multiple network vendors allowing for a single solution to provide unified insights for analysis. This allows for service providers to proactively identify, investigate, and resolve anomalies with various KPIs, compare various network technologies coverage and quality, subscriber experience measurements, and device insights across their networks.

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Planning

Benchmarking the entire network will reveal some hot spots with poor coverage or areas requiring attention. The area could be a considered for planning for a new site or optimization to ensure a consistent experience across the entire network. Subscribers have many more choices than ever before and there are many factors that go into deciding which service provider is best. Coverage Assurance not only can allow service providers to evaluate their performance and quality themselves by providing them the flexibility to look across their network for any time period without having to wait for a report to be conducted or scheduled, but it can also automate site deployment if new sites are needed, via an automated site verification report. The report allows, at a glance, to observe if deployed sites passed acceptance criteria, and for those sites not passing, it provides an understanding of root cause ‒ avoiding expensive and time consuming drive tests.

Coverage Assurance dynamic zoom capability allows zooming into areas (from national, region, and street level of coverage) or date and time ranges, where analyses of devices, events, or strategic subscribers can be performed to establish a winning position within a given geographical radius. Compare coverage and quality across various technologies or compare new services/features before and after they are introduced in order to reduce planning cycles.

NITRO Mobile Automated Site Verification

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Coverage Assurance Map View revealing a site that might need additional capacity

5G Planning and Testing New Services

The Internet of Things (IoT) is prevalent and utilized across nearly all industries and sectors. As IoT developers create smarter IoT solutions requiring more powerful connectivity, service providers must create new ways to scale coverage to support these solutions. With highly anticipated developments in 5G networks, big data analytics, and low power C-IoT, the capabilities of IoT innovation are endless.

The 5G deployment focus today is mostly targeted towards rollouts and with future network deployment topology (i.e. densification) providing improved mobile subscriber quality. 5G, however, goes far beyond a simple speed boost or connecting of new devices. The quantitative advantages of 5G are joined by qualitative factors that will enable all kinds of new cellular use cases and coverage strategies. We are moving from a cell-centric world to a beam-centric environment. Elevation and accuracy requirements are now much higher than with 2G/3G/4G. Not only will 5G provide better accuracy, but now the inclusion of elevation provides newer forms of coverage data for the introduction of new use cases, such as with IoT.

5G NR Performance ‒ illustrating time on 5G vs 4G and average subscribers per hour

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Pivot within same Coverage Assurance Map View to view 4G coverage

Knowing where 5G capable devices are within the network or understanding how those devices perform allows service providers to make informed and precise decisions about placement of 5G infrastructure. Couple that with analysis of 4G network radio capacity enables service providers to ensure 4G coverage and capacity to support that the initial 5G deployment can scale to meet the needs of subscribers and the business within a multi-technology network. Use Site Verification to speed 5G site deployment and validation ‒ lowering costs, and once deployed, analyze subscriber time on 5G.

Collaboration Across Departments

NITRO Mobile Coverage Assurance, unique and leading within the industry, combines RAN and Core quality monitoring data into a single summarized dashboard with easy to understand actionable information. Coverage Assurance workflows allow non-expert users to identify areas of poor quality and to triage to the part of the network, RAN and Core, that is causing the poor performance. Fully configurable and customizable, providing subscriber quality resolution in just a few clicks, enabling operational efficiency not previously available to operators. Providing one unified RAN and Core view of all issues in an intuitive dashboard enables quick collaboration between RAN and Core teams, leading to significant operating expenditure savings for your business. Supporting 3G, LTE, and now 5G NR non-standalone technologies, the maps, reports, and tables from Coverage Assurance allow network engineers to coordinate with an array of operator organizations in a variety of money saving ways.

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Network Automation

As service providers move closer toward network automation, they require new ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness through developing methods of automation and analysis. The result will ultimately be to reduce operating expenses and decrease human error. Coverage Assurance provides integrated proactive context-driven workflows, realtime NOC Dashboards, and coverage and quality reports allowing service providers to fully prepare to manage complexity, exceed subscriber expectations, while taking a step closer toward automation. One dashboard, minimal clicks, answers, and resolution ‒ potentially within the same operational organization or even the same engineer!

Coverage Assurance Unified RAN and Core Workflow: Map, Scores, KPI view with Cause Codes, Session Trace and Answers!