Mobile networks are based on cells, which can only support so many local users at once before performance starts to head south. A really heavy user will speed up this process, so operators are increasingly looking at ways to pinpoint problem locations. The idea here is to deploy cheap equipment (such as femtocells, small cells or even Wi-Fi hotspots) exactly where it is needed, so someone with high data requirements doesn’t spoil the mobile internet experience for other customers in their vicinity.

Arieso’s software does this by analyzing vast amounts of mobile connection events in a geolocated fashion, right down to building-level resolution. The firm is also, along with the likes of Intucell, one of the companies leading the emerging self-optimizing network (SON) trend, which will see radio access networks (RANs) dynamically adapt on a geographical basis so each cell is optimized for the levels of usage found at its location.

The Arieso purchase, worth $85 million in cash, brings Milpitas, CA.-based JDSU new engineering expertise and technology based on proprietary algorithms, such as the AriesoGEO network monitoring and optimization package and the AriesoACP network-planning product. JDSU said in a statement that it would integrate these with its own portfolio, notably with PacketPortal – a cloud-based data-capture tool that can be embedded in carriers’ networks.

Here’s what JDSU communications test and measurement chief David Heard had to say:

“Arieso’s mobility expertise, market leadership and culture of innovation are directly in line with our strategy to deliver unmatched network visibility and intelligence to our customers. They are a recognized mobility leader and, as part of JDSU, create new, unique opportunities for innovation in one of the fastest-growing segments of the market.”

According to JDSU, the RAN optimization and SON markets are worth around $700 million today, and will be worth over $1 billion by 2015.

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In a recent interview, CTO Mike Flanagan said Arieso is working with a major U.S. carrier to plan for on cellular optimization planning — technology that could eventually fuel the advent of small cells. (Update: Flanagan reached back out to me to clarify that Arieso’s U.S. carrier customer is using its technology to optimize its macro network today, but it isn’t currently planning a small cell rollout). He wouldn’t name the operator, saying only it was a Tier I player, but that operator was using its network analysis and optimization tools to identify areas of high-congestion in the network – both in specific locations and from specific customers, Flanagan said. Those analytics can then be used to plan the operator’s future network expansion with precision. Rather than add an expensive layer of bandwidth throughout the network, Flanagan said, carriers could target only the areas where they need the extra bandwidth, on a cell-by-cell and even a customer-by-customer basis.

“If you are living on this planet, spectrum arrives slowly,” Flanagan said. Carriers can no longer count on spectrum being readily available for new networks, as evidenced by Verizon Wireless and AT&Ts’ to sort out what airwaves remain. “The answer is not to necessarily build new networks but improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the existing ones,” Flanagan said.

By signal-to-noise ratio, Flanagan is referring to basic quandary of cellular network design: the further away a device is from the tower, the more noise is introduced into the transmission, impairing signal strength and reducing bandwidth available over the connection. Building networks that can minimize that problem is the goal of an emerging tech sector of the wireless industry called self-optimizing networks, or SON. In my recent Long View analysis in GigaOM Pro (subscription required), I explore how technologies like Arieso’s and Intucell’s aim to use SON technologies to create more consistent, more resilient and higher-capacity networks by making them multi-layered and agile.

In Arieso’s case SON means planning upgrades to the network with surgical precision. In Europe, Vodafone is already using Arieso’s platforms to pinpoint problem spots in its networks, Flanagan said.

“For instance, if I have a customer who lives right at the edge of a cell consuming enormous amounts of data, he’s messing up the network for everyone else using that cell,” Flanagan said. Rather than try to boot that customer off the network, the carrier could offer that customer a femtocell or deploy a public small cell in his vicinity, both of which would suddenly free up network resources for everyone else. “For less than a $1000 investment, I clear up a capacity problem, and assuming it’s a good customer paying a $100 monthly bill, I get a return on that investment after a year.”

Operators aren’t going to go around placing individual cells for every customer, but the level of precision Arieso’s planning tools allow can be scaled network-wide, allowing operators to deploy heterogeneous networks, or hetnets, using small cells to build high-density clusters of capacity under the macro network umbrella. Right now, Arieso’s technology isn’t true SON because there’s no “self”-actualizing component — carriers still have to install those new cells manually. But Flanagan said that Arieso’s platform could eventually become the basis for dynamically self-optimizing systems like those being deployed by Intucell today. In such a scenario, operators don’t react to congestion problems by installing new base station. Instead the network itself reconfigures itself on the fly to meet traffic demands, following congestion as it moves through the network.

Cells image courtesy of Flickr user Patrick Hoesly

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Sounds like science fiction, but this is real technology commercially available today. Israeli startup Intucell has already deployed it in its home country with operator Pelephone and is engaged in multiple other trials. AT&T, however, is the big fish, and Intucell is hoping its nationwide launch of the technology across its HSPA and LTE networks will validate SON for the rest of the world.

I detailed how Intucell’s dynamic SON platform works in December, but in short, it uses a distributed network intelligence to track the network’s health and levels of congestion. It then adjusts the transmission power of each cell in the network to create the best possible configuration for both coverage and capacity. Quite literally cell towers start following you, expanding their cell radii as you move closer to their edges, while neighboring cells recede. By moving the network around you as you yourself move through the network, SON can find the optimal overall topology at any given movement to provide the best coverage and capacity to thousands of users within a cluster of cells. It’s pretty cool stuff.

So what’s the benefit? According to AT&T, its initial trials of the technology over HSPA networks in two markets resulted in a 10 percent reduction in dropped calls. That is a tangible benefit, but it is nothing when you compare it to SON’s impact on mobile data capacity. AT&T isn’t releasing any numbers on how SON improved data performance, but Intucell pointed to data it has collected from other trials.

According to Intucell CEO Rani Wellingstein, the technology can reduce cell congestion anywhere from 10 to 40 percent depending on the configuration of the network, allowing operators to pack more capacity onto less infrastructure. Those capacity increases are also passed onto the consumer in the form of faster speeds. SON can boost the average throughput by up to 15 percent of the network’s theoretical limit, which in many cases could equate to a 1 Mbps or greater increase in downlink speeds.

“AT&T is perceived as the operator with the highest data crunch problem,” Wellingstein said. “It has the highest penetration of smartphones and the highest penetration of iPhones. It makes sense that it would be the first operator in North America to deploy dynamic SON.”

SON has other benefits. It can make networks self-healing. If a cell site is down — which, according to Wellingstein, is the case for 1 to 2 percent of the world’s cells at any given time — the surrounding cells can expand their radius to fill the hole in the network. When the site is repaired the cells retract to their normal size.

AT&T is moving aggressively with the technology. It started trialing Intucell’s platform last April, but it plans to have the technology in all of its networks nationwide by the end of the year. Intucell and AT&T did not disclose the financial terms of their deal, but Wellingstein said deploying SON is a fraction of the cost of adding the same capacity through new radio infrastructure. He said a U.S. operator could add basic SON functions to a nationwide network for around $50 million. Not exactly cheap, but in a country the size of the U.S., even the most modest network deployment can run multiple billions of dollars.

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Such architectures speak to the growing complexity in cellular networks as more people use more devices on them. Plus, the very mobility of such devices makes building out a network even more of a challenge. Base stations are fixed devices with fixed characteristics. Turning them into something that can scale to deliver capacity on command isn’t easy. But NSN thinks it has found a way.

Called Flexi Zone, the network looks a bit like the distributed antenna systems (DAS) operators have deployed at sporting venues and in office buildings to spread the normally circular cell into indoor nooks and crannies. But Flexi Zone goes far beyond the mere redistribution of coverage. Instead it allows an operator to densely pack 100 cells’ worth of capacity into a confined area, while shaping the network’s coverage to the exact contours of the shopping mall or stadium it inhabits.

Flexi Zone’s many, many pieces

Flexi Zone is actually an amalgamation of several technologies, all of which have yet to be implemented in any mobile network on a large scale. Let’s tick them off one by one:

• Small Cells. Imagine femtocells and Wi-Fi access points having a big party where everyone is hopped up on speed, and you get the idea. Hetnet aims to create a multi-layered network, in which traditional macro-cellular towers provide a blanket of coverage, while underneath that umbrella hundreds of thousands of small cells in high-traffic areas do the heavy bandwidth lifting. NSN’s Flexi Zone, however, uses small cells for both coverage and capacity. Macro cells often can’t reach the indoor environments Flexi Zone is designed for, so the small cells pull double duty.
• Cloud RAN. Perhaps the most far-out concept in Flexi Zone’s architecture, NSN’s Liquid Radio concept would decouple the base station from the radio. We have written before about Intel and other vendors’ attempt to move the radio access network (RAN) into the cloud, where the processing resources and intelligence of the network can be pooled and then applied wherever they’re needed at any given moment. Flexi Zone would leave a limited amount of baseband capacity at each small cell to support normal capacity conditions. But when things get hairy, the cloud kicks in, taking over much of the computational load of a congested cell. This allows operators to scale their networks more efficiently by not having to overbuild each cell for peak traffic conditions.
• Mesh Networking. One of the biggest limitations of small cells is backhaul. A high-capacity LTE radio can’t be backhauled with string and twine, but connecting hundreds of thousands with fiber links is a daunting if not impossible task. So NSN is taking a page from the metro Wi-Fi’s book, using radios to backhaul other radios. High-capacity 802.11n links and even LTE will connect the closely spaced nodes together. To deploy a small cell, the operator just needs to find a wall power outlet.
• Self-Organizing Networks. When you have a hundred densely packed cells all running on the same frequencies, you have the potential for an interference mess, and operators can’t do the careful testing and tuning they perform on the macro network at the scale small cells require. NSN is using self-organizing network, or SON, technology to give each cell enough self-awareness to identify its neighbors and keep its own transmission power in check, thus avoiding chaos over the airwaves. This kind of network self-management is pretty nifty, but things get really exciting when the equation includes dynamic SON, which allows individual cells to grow and shrink as traffic patterns change.

Sounds neat, but why does this matter?

NSN said the benefits of the technology would be multi-fold. Flexi Zone not only provides a solution for indoor coverage – where most mobile data traffic is moving these days; it can also supply orders-of-magnitude more capacity than a macro cell over the same square footage. And because of the Cloud-RAN and mesh techniques, infrastructure costs drop. NSN concluded that operators can use Flexi Zone to cut in half the cost of delivering a bit of traffic.

Whether operators would pass those savings on to their customers in the form of cheaper data plans is another question, but more efficient network technologies are definitely key to propelling the mobile data revolution forward and offsetting the need for operators to secure more spectrum in the future. Because Flexi Zone makes extensive use of Wi-Fi, operators can also tap into free unlicensed spectrum and cheap Wi-Fi networking gear, adding gobs of capacity to their networks for little cash.

NSN’s Flexi Zone is definitely the most ambitious hetnet proposal we’ve seen coming out of Mobile World Congress so far, but it’s not the only one. Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio architecture already uses many of the same Cloud-RAN and small cell techniques as Flexi Zone and Liquid Radio, and at MWC the Franco-American vendor is adding Wi-Fi to the mix. At the event, InterDigital plans to show how Wi-Fi can be wedged into the white-spaces spectrum between TV broadcasts to add more oomph to mobile network connections.

Ericsson is buying its way into Wi-Fi. We broke the story of its purchase of metro Wi-Fi vendor BelAir last month, and on Tuesday Ericsson confirmed the deal. Next week in Barcelona we’ll probably hear the first details on how Ericsson will incorporate BelAir’s hybrid Wi-Fi/cellular technology into its portfolio. BelAir competitor Ruckus Wireless plans to unveil its first hybrid Wi-Fi/LTE small cell at show, using the same mesh-networking techniques as Flexi Zone to create dense capacity clusters for outdoor environments.

As I wrote last week, for a show focused on cellular networking, MWC is taking on a strong Wi-Fi tone this year. Not all operators have gotten Wi-Fi religion yet, but their vendors certainly have. By weaving Wi-Fi more intimately into the network fabric, NSN may gain some converts.

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LTE-Advanced will ultimately have a huge impact on the mobile networks and the devices that use them, but don’t expect 1 Gbps speeds to suddenly pop on your phones next year. LTE-Advanced won’t come out as a single new network like plain-old LTE did, but rather, in waves. It’s more like a menu of technologies: Operators will select whatever technology or technique that looks tastiest at the time, implement it in their current LTE networks, and when they get hungry for more speed, capacity or efficiency, they will return to their vendors for another meal. My colleague Stacey has already detailed all the different menu selections in a previous post, so I won’t go into all of them here. But I’ll go over some of the big-ticket items:

• Network Crazy Glue. The LTE-Advanced AT&T, Sprint and Clearwire are talking about launching next year is really a single component of the standard, called carrier aggregation. Simply put, it allows operators to bond their current downlink and uplink channels — known collectively as carriers – on top of one another to create stupendously fast connection speeds, but ….
• Don’t count on a Gigabit anytime soon. While the standards call for networks that will eventually support 1 Gbps speeds to stationary devices, that’s more of theoretical aspiration than a realistic goal. For Verizon to hit those speeds, it would need to devote 10 times the amount of capacity it currently uses for LTE to LTE-Advanced — that’s 200 MHz, and it only has 118 MHz across all of its networks.
•  Will your phone have rabbit ears?  LTE-Advanced will boost the number of antennas supported in a device from two to eight and will use a technique called MIMO to send a single transmission over multiple paths, ultimately giving your device a big boost in speed. But MIMO antennas can’t be stacked on top of one another like stogies in a cigar box; they need their space to work. So, unless you want to carry a device the size of a Volkswagen in your pocket, you won’t be getting an eight-antenna device — and their crazy fast speeds — any time soon.
• Speaking of Volkswagens. Cars may wind up being the ideal candidates to reap the full benefits of MIMO and LTE-Advanced. Unlike our phones, cars have alternators, which can supply the enormous power demands eight antennas would require. Each antenna draws the power equivalent of single cellphone connection, which is why today’s LTE devices go dead so quickly. Battery efficiency will have to improve immensely before handset makers can think about eight, or even four, MIMO antennas to any mobile device.
• Is LTE-Advanced really 5G? Sure, if you want it to be. 3G, 4G and 5G have all become meaningless marketing terms (Broadcom is already applying 5G to Wi-Fi). If you want to get technical though, LTE-Advanced, at least its initial implementation, isn’t even considered 4G by the ITU’s definitions. A 4G network must be theoretically capable of supporting a downlink of 1 Gbps in a fixed environment, which will be impossible for most of the world’s operators to achieve. So the technical definitions are just as useless as the marketing ones for distinguishing between the generations of network technology — unless we want to remain in a world of perpetual 3G.

Like I said, we’ll start seeing the beginning of all of this LTE-Advanced craziness next year when AT&T, and possibly Sprint, start duct-taping their carriers together. I wouldn’t, however, expect the impact on the customer to be that big. But don’t lose hope. LTE-Advanced may launch with a murmur, but its impact on your smartphone, your tablet and your vehicle — and hopefully your monthly wireless bill — will grow as operators dive more fully into the standard.

If you want  more details about the possibilities and limitations of LTE-Advanced, check out my GigaOM Pro analysis (subscription required) on the subject.

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First, some background about how wireless networks behave: A cellular network is a shared resource, meaning a cell’s capacity is divided among all of the customers currently within it, but the overall capacity of that cell is determined by where all those customers happen to be within the cell. If customers are all at the cell’s perimeter where the air link is most fragile, then the overall capacity is small. If those customers are clustered in the center, then the overall capacity available increases.

Furthermore, a cell’s capacity is always a weakest link type of situation. An outlying device at the edge of the cell will degrade the capacity available to customers at its center. Intucell’s technology is designed to solve that problem by identifying those situations in which a cell’s capacity isn’t being utilized to its fullest. The SON intelligence forces towers to talk to one another and recognize when outliers at the cell’s fringes are spoiling the party for rest. Intucell then tells neighboring cells to expand to grab those edge customers, while the original cell shrinks, boosting the capacity available to remaining customers within it.

“Until now optimizing a radio access network has been sort of a type of witchcraft,” Intucell CEO Rani Wellingstein in a recent interview. “Engineers would typically retune networks on a weekly or a monthly basis. That kind of model was good for when traffic was not so dynamic, but today congestion is moving dynamically through the network.”

But wait, SON can do more

Last month, Israel’s Pelephone became the first operator to commercially deploy Intucell’s technology network-wide, though Wellingstein said other Tier I operators globally are now using the SON system. In North America, a major carrier is using the technology in a commercial trial in two cities, Wellingstein said, though he wouldn’t reveal which one.

Operators are using the technology to retune the network every few minutes, which  allows them to jigger the network for the changing traffic patterns throughout the day. But Wellingstein said the SON platform can retune in real time, which would allow the network to account not just for where its customers are but where they will be.

Take the example of city bus with a 4G connection distributed to all of its passengers through Wi-Fi. Normally passengers would experience huge fluctuations in bandwidth as they moved from a cell’s center to its edge and crossed over into neighboring cell’s edge and so forth. But by anticipating where that hotspot-on-wheels is going, the network could grow the cell it’s driving through, keeping its edge well ahead of the bus and thus maintaining its high-bandwidth connection. Meanwhile, SON intelligence would also tell a neighboring cell running on a different frequency to expand, so that both cells overlap. When it’s finally time for the first cell to relinquish its connection to the second, the bus would already be well within that second cell’s perimeter and instantly have access to a much higher-bandwidth connection.

Intucell estimates these techniques can reduce dropped call rates by 10 percent and even more significantly, boost overall data capacity throughout the network anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent. That will have a huge impact on how carriers plan for future growth. Not only will they be able to offer faster and more consistent speeds, it would allow them to slow down the endless cycle of capacity upgrades as more customers sign up for 3G and 4G services.

Enter het net

Ultimately, SON will have its biggest impact as the industry moves to the next phase of cellular design: the heterogeneous network, or het net for short. Rather than build networks merely as a bunch of macro cells in a grid, operators will throw a myriad of small cells into the mix, all of which live inside of their macro brethren. The big network will be used to provide an umbrella layer of coverage, while the ‘small’ network of millions of metro-, pico-, and femtocells will supply enormous quantities of capacity.

We’re already starting to see the beginnings of het net with public Wi-Fi networks. Either at the behest of their carriers or on their own recognizance, customers are offloading enormous amounts of data onto free or cheap Wi-Fi access points. But operators like Verizon Wireless hope to recreate such topologies using their own spectrum. The complexities of such a network are enormous. Not only would they involve individual carriers managing networks of hundreds of thousands – if not millions — of nodes rather than thousands, but those small cells would need to utilize the same spectrum as the over-arching macrocells above them. That means highly dynamic network organization technologies like SON will be necessary to wrap those cells around one another. Otherwise, het net would just be another word for noise.

Tower Image courtesy of Flickr user Nikhil Verma

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