Mobile Broadband Optimization: A Landscape View

In this business we are inundated with new terms, concepts, and technologies. It's the nature of the beast I suppose. Occasionally, however, certain terms or phrases become particularly confusing to the market. In recent meetings with a number of mobile operators around the world, I found this particularly true with the emerging set of technologies lumped under the broad category of Mobile Optimization, or Mobile Broadband Optimization. With this experience fresh in my mind, I thought it might be useful to kick off our Blog by offering some structure and clarity around these emerging technologies. This particular topic has risen in importance as the mobile data market has exploded and mobile operators look for ways to help them control, monetize, and support this traffic flooding their networks.

Although there is a wide range of technologies, products, and solutions that fall into the mobile optimization category, they all attempt to tackle one or more of the following areas of pain and opportunity:

• Reduce traffic transiting the mobile network
• Improve the customer experience
• Classify and control subscriber sessions

A useful way to break down the Mobile Broadband Optimization landscape is to categorize solutions in terms of (1) which of the above areas they address, and (2) where in the network they are deployed and have their strongest effect.

The following diagram shows how a mobile network is constructed and the typical locations of optimization solutions. As you can see, solutions land in three main locations:

1. Client Device-based solutions

Consisting of software that provides user-based optimization including local caching of content and session optimization to reduce latency and improve connection reliability. Often times these solutions work in conjunction with Mobile Core-based solutions.

2. Mobile Core-based solutions

These are typically deployed in data centers or in the network core, and include:

1. Caching to reduce Internet connection bandwidth
2. Session Optimization to optimize specific applications such as video or user TCP sessions
3. Deep Packet Inspection and Policy Enforcement to control and enforce policy
4. Video/Audio Transcoding to reduce the traffic sent to users by lowering the size, quality, and frame rates of traffic
5. Internet Offload to shift mobile broadband to lower cost, best-effort internet connections

3. RAN-based solutions

Solutions focused on the Radio Access Network (RAN) include:

1. RAN Content Optimization – a new category that specifically targets the most congested and cost-sensitive part of the network: the RAN or backhaul. This category specifically reduces the traffic traveling across the RAN by looking into the user content flows and optimally delivering the content across the RAN. This has the overall effect of reducing congestion, lowering transmission costs, and improving the customer experience during peak traffic periods.
2. Alternative RAN Transport – not technically Mobile Broadband Optimization solutions but they can provide higher bandwidth and some cost savings to operators. These alternatives include Femtocells, Wifi offload, packet-based Microwave, packet Transport, and Pseudo-wire approaches.

In upcoming blog contributions, we will explore aspects of this landscape in more detail and look at the benefits, limitations, and challenges of various approaches. If you have questions or comments please click on the feedback button above.