Joanne Steinberg, Director of Strategic Marketing, talks about how operators can use network and subscriber activity to create revenue from their mobile broadband network.

Tekelec recently released a reference guide that describes policy management solutions to enable cost effective deployment of broadband service, which guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) and generate revenue. Use cases include:
• Fair Use Management
• IMS VoLTE Call Control
• Location/Roaming

Download the reference guide here.

By Joanne Steinberg, Strategic Marketing Director

The M2M industry is rapidly expanding, with analyst firms estimating that we’ll have 50 billion connected devices by 2020. So how can service providers benefit from this proliferation in machine-enabled devices? Here are some of the interesting use cases I’ve seen for M2M services:

• Using policy and device profiles and usage characteristics to create tailored service plans that can be based on connections, transactions, or the amount and frequency of data transmissions.  An example would be allowing electricity meters to securely connect to the network and send data only at certain times of day or when required.
• Being able to offer a variety of service level agreements. For example, a tablet device needs to download new ebooks quickly but infrequently, and usually only from one website. In this case, there is an established model for purchases, where connectivity becomes an add-on or revenue share. The bandwidth needed to read the book is low. On the other hand a traffic surveillance camera with automatic backup to online storage will send large amounts of data.
• M2M services can also monitor the traffic and usage patterns for a smart car and leverage this intelligence to evolve the smart car service and marketing approach.
• And finally there are some important security use cases, such as tracking a machine’s usage and if a threshold is exceeded, an alert or location look up can be sent to ensure the device is not stolen or broken. 

While SIP provides great support for session management, it lacks capabilities to set underlying network QoS parameters or to support business rules that carriers need to offer differentiated services or to meet regulatory requirements.  Increasingly, these issues are being solved by using policy management in conjunction with SIP.

To facilitate information exchange between session management and policy, the Rx reference point, as defined in 3GPP TS 23.203, is used to exchange application level session information between the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) and the Application Function (AF). In the case of SIP-based session management the AF can be the P-CSCF, a Session Border Controller (SBC) or potentially a softswitch. Some typical use cases supported by the Rx interface include:

• SIP-based VoIP for cable MSOs: The cable MSO IP infrastructure is a shared IP pipe that can carry a variety of services, ranging from high speed data to VoIP or video conferencing. Cable IP networks also tend to be asymmetric – with greater bandwidth in the downstream direction (from the network to the customer). While voice traffic doesn’t require a great deal of bandwidth in either the upstream or downstream direction, it does require low latency and jitter in order to provide “PSTN” quality voice.

  Many cable MSOs have deployed a PCRF-based architecture to set the appropriate QoS for SIP initiated calls. In this case, the AF (which in the cable MSO scenario could be a softswitch) passes the SIP SDP parameters across the Rx interface using DIAMETER to the PCRF. The PCRF looks at the SDP parameters passed in the Rx message to adjust the DOCSIS parameters in the network to ensure the QoS is appropriate for the type of session, codec, or other parameters that are indicated in the SDP. Note the flexibility of SIP and Packet Cable Multimedia (PCMM) Architecture means the same infrastructure can support videoconferencing or any other SIP-based service. The very first market trial that Tekelec participated in for PCMM was a SIP-based videoconferencing service but this has tended to be a niche application for operators especially when compared to VoIP service.

• IMS-based Services for LTE based Wireless Networks: Many wireless carriers throughout the world have announced their support for LTE radio access networks (RANs) and for the Voice over LTE (VoLTE) work that is now being led by the GSMA. LTE based (RANs) have a number of benefits versus today’s RAN technology, including support for higher bandwidths, higher spectral efficiency, lower cost per bit and support for an all IP network (i.e., IP from the handset through the RAN into the core). The VoLTE architecture takes advantage of this IP infrastructure by specifying how IMS based core network can be deployed to support services such as voice.

  Similar to the cable MSO scenario above, the LTE RAN provides an “all-IP” pipe over which all services are carried.  A PCRF-based architecture is essential in ensuring that the appropriate QoS is set based on the type of service.  In an IMS based network the P-CSCF acts as the entry point to core network. The P-CSCF also translates the SDP body contained in the SIP INVITE message from the user equipment (UE) into DIAMETER over the Rx interface and sends it to the PCRF. In response to the received parameters the PCRF can:

  • Can choose to disallow a session setup If the SDP offer contains a codec or any other media characteristics that are not allowed by the service agreement the subscriber has with the operator,
  • Ensure that the user is entitled to use the service and authorize the radio bearer with the appropriate QoS,
  • Zero-rate the usage so the VoIP usage doesn’t count against the user’s data bucket in case the user does not have an “all you can eat” data plan,
  • Get the CALEA app involved if the call needs to be managed for legal reasons

In addition to these more common use cases, there is growing interest in the industry around other use cases.

• Significant interest is gathering around SIP trunking applications for commercial customers of cable MSOs.  The cable operators have been investigating how to do “T1-replacement” and other trunk-oriented voice offerings, but have mostly either restricted deployment to direct fiber-based plant or stayed at the small end of the SOHO market.  Now, with DOCSIS 3.0 bandwidth, PCMM QoS, and new eSBC products, they can make strong offerings to support trunk services at 12-, 24-, and higher line counts.  For these users, QoS control is seen as a baseline requirement and not an option.  Most frequently there is an SBC involved, which provides an Rx interface with the necessary parameters that can be used to set the appropriate QoS in the network based on call type.  While the line counts aren’t expected to be large initially it is helping to provide the “toe in the water” driving many operators to SIP with PCMM QoS on DOCSIS.
• Initial deployments of residential VoIP in U.S.-based cable companies were primarily been based on session management protocols such as the Network-based Call Signaling (NCS) and Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) and the PacketCable 1.x specifications. These deployments are very cable specific and the number of vendors supporting them is relatively small. The cable operators are seeing the opportunity to evolve to a much more widely accepted standard, namely IMS. The evolution to an IMS core means that cable MSOs are getting ready to “cap & grow” and then migrate millions of lines to IMS with PCMM (PacketCable2.0). Given the use of IMS the obvious choice for managing QoS is a PCRF based architecture using Rx from the P-CSCF or an SBC.

Additional technical details on the topics discussed here, including the definition of the Rx interface, the signaling flows and Quality of Service (QoS) parameter mapping and the Rx protocol definition can be found in 3GPP technical specifications TS23.203, TS29.213 and TS 29.214.