Tekelec's Performance Intelligence Center (PIC) is a centralized performance and service management system that processes and archives call detail records (CDRs) from the network. CDRs can be used to generate service packages for optimizing a variety of services: prepaid, roaming, SMS, and voice over IP (VoIP). Tekelec's Performance Intelligence Center provides network data usage in the form of reports and customized dashboards, accessible by any authorized user through standard browsers. The solution enables service providers to distribute information to multiple departments, eliminating the need for and expense of redundant
systems.
The Performance Intelligence system provides a variety of reports, including:
- SMS transport: Detects and locates efficiency issues at the transport level
- Mobile originated (MO) and mobile terminated (MT) SMS transaction QoS: Detects problems such as congestion, routing errors and load-sharing issues to efficiently manage SMS transactions
- Potential fraud: Detects abnormal ratios, i.e., number of Send Routing Information (SRI), SMS deliver, SMS sent, and SMS received -- pinpointing potential spamming or fraud
Benefits
The Performance Intelligence Center improves network performance, identifying bottleneces and other problems before they become service affecting. In addition, the Performance Intelligence Center:
- Improves network management. The Performance Intelligence Center provides an accurate view of traffic patterns, enabling operators to plan and manage their network resources to accommodate sudden traffic spikes that can be created by mass call events or spam attacks
- Provides advanced network analysis. Using the solution's customized statistics, operators can proactively identify fraud and abnormal traffic loads and patterns to maintain network security
- Enhances network performance and QoS. Operators can compare message rates with network performance to identify bottlenecks and other problems before they become service affecting
- Reduces CAPEX. The Performance Intelligence Center gives an accurate view of the network, which allows operators to invest only in theresources they need when they need them
Use Case 1 - Identifying Fraudulent Network Traffic
Problem
In figure 1, Operator A fraudulently uses Operator C’s
addresses to send SMS messages to Operator B’s network.
Operator A avoids charges since the messages are charged
to Operator C. Without a comprehensive monitoring
system, Operator C is not aware of the fraudulent SMS
messages until receiving Operator B’s bill and has difficulty
documenting the fraud.
Solution
By deploying Tekelec’s Performance Intelligence Center, Operator C can proactively detect
in real-time unusual or suspicious signaling connection
control point (SCCP) addresses, as well as unusually high
numbers of SMS responses without corresponding SMS
sends. The Performance Intelligence Center correlates the sent SMS message with the
corresponding acknowledgement and generates an alarm
when it detects a signifcant number of suspicious messages.
The trace enables Operator C to proactively detect and
document the fraud while it is occurring – before billing has
occurred.
Benefits
- Avoid costly and time-consuming disputes
- Reduce the need and cost for network over-engineering
by decreasing fraudulent network traffic
Use Case 2 - Monitoring Traffic Load More Efficiently
Problem
Operators can deploy a variety of switch-based solutions to monitor
and manage traffic loads on the SMSC. One common method is to
rely on internal switch indicators to identify abnormal loads. One of
the main challenges with this approach is that there is no dedicated
monitoring resource in the switch. At critical times, when the switch
capacity is overloaded, processing power must be committed to
managing the SMS traffic, not to monitoring the traffic. As a result,
problems often are not identified until the switch itself crashes.
Solution
Tekelec’s Performance Intelligence Center continuously surveys the SMS system and can be
configured to send an alarm if thresholds are reached pertaining to
incoming message counts, error counts, or overall performance of
the SMS system. This enables the operator to proactively manage the
traffic load before service is negatively impacted.
Benefits
- Improve SMS traffic management during peak loads
- Improve service availability and customer satisfaction
