The growing popularity of smart devices and cloud applications brings over 100% growth in mobile traffic annually, accelerating deployments of LTE networks. According to the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), by the Q3 of 2013, 433 telcos have invested in LTE network construction and 200 LTE networks supported commercial services. The LTE era is coming, enabling an LTE bearer network that is available for all services.

Developing network technologies and complicated operating requirements bring both opportunities and challenges to the entire industry. Currently, telcos pay special attention to finding ways to balance network resources in order to build an LTE bearer network with high quality of service, excellent performance, and optimal user experience, and to improve brand competitiveness.

Efficient LTE Bearer Network Planning Assists Telcos to Evolve Seamlessly to LTE Networks

Based on the deep analysis and understanding achieved through global LTE bearer network projects, Huawei put forward an LTE bearer network evolution solution, which provides services such as efficient capacity assessment and optimization, network planning and optimization, and cross-domain coordinated planning to help telcos implement smooth evolution from 2G/3G to LTE networks.

Capacity Assessment and Optimization

Telcos need LTE bearer network evolution plans that meet network development requirements and feature scalability. These plans can assist telcos to better build LTE bearer networks. However, Telcos must consider the following points: Check whether the bandwidth is suitable; see whether traffic is distributed properly; and find ways to expand or adjust the bandwidth after LTE services are added on the live network. To cope with these problems, Huawei's LTE bearer network evolution capacity assessment service accurately evaluates the increase in capacity, ensures precise capacity expansion prediction, and supports further LTE service and network construction planning based on network capacity measurement, LTE traffic simulation, and fault-triggered switchover simulation using professional assessment tools.

Capacity Measurement: Huawei uses the 1:1 routing simulation technology to streamline physical topology, service path, and capacity data and build the network simulation model on the analysis platform, making the network traffic visible to facilitate network load identification.

Capacity Overlay Prediction: Huawei designs the LTE service evolution model including factors such as evolution phases, service scales, oversubscription ratio, and service path distribution based on service development requirements. Adding LTE service models in different evolution phases on the simulation model of the live network can help telcos directly predict capacity expansion in each phase. With the commercial use of LTE networks, dynamic changes of the traffic model can be exported in a report, and the traffic topology, oversubscription ratio, bottlenecks, and imbalance in traffic distribution can be displayed in a graphical manner to provide guidance for LTE network capacity adjustment and construction planning.

Fault-triggered Switchover Simulation: Although network faults are inevitable, protection switchover technologies allow traffic reallocation when faults occur, which can prevent traffic interruption. However, the service path and traffic model are changed. In most cases, traffic reallocation will cause new link congestions. To address this problem, Huawei's capacity assessment service supports fault simulation on the network simulation model. Huawei can design fault scenarios based on telcos' requirements and perform fault simulation on paths with high load to check traffic reallocation after faults occur and verify that protection switchovers are successful.

Network Planning and Optimization

The entire network architecture changes during the evolution from 2G/3G to LTE and it resembles like a typical IP broadband network architecture. Therefore, the evolution solution must be customized. For example, build a Layer 3optimized multi-protocol coordinated protection and improve E2E QoS to carry LTE services to meet service development requirements of the next 3 to 5 years.

Building a Layer 3: To meet LTE service development requirements, properly design the network architecture and clarify the service traffic model to facilitate network maintenance and capacity expansion. Additionally, plan precisely on how to allocate physical resources to use the network resources effectively.

Optimizing Multi-protocol Coordinated Protection: Design E2E links with single/multi-node protection, plan a large number of path protection groups, and properly design protection paths to ensure balanced load thus preventing traffic overflows after switchovers.

Optimizing E2E QoS: LTE Services are more diversified, making it very important to find ways to allocate the bandwidth to multiple services. Perform priority mapping at the ingress of the DS domain for scheduling service differentiation, configure services with E2E bandwidth for balancing bandwidth and statistical multiplexing, set CAR at the ingress of services to allow only the authorized traffic to pass through, and timely pre-warn network congestions so that customers can expand the capacity or adjust service paths in advance.

Cross-domain Coordinated Planning

LTE network development requires a large number of eNodeB’s as well as IP network planning, design, and deployment, making the process complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Besides, the design process of each domain is separate, so any change of a site on the wireless side will bring corresponding changes to microwave and router designs on the IP network. Based on actual project experience, if 10% of wireless sites are changed in the design, 40% of microwave designs and 20% of router designs will be changed, resulting in an impact to project schedule by about 20% due to slow updates and inaccurate results caused by a large number of complicated correlated analyses. Huawei's cross-domain collaborative planning service manages collaborative design processes and supports automatic key parameter analyses on the IP Evolution platform. Meanwhile, customers can directly view the devices and links which need to be updated on the GUI. Huawei's cross-domain collaborative planning service can improve efficiency by 70% and accuracy by 50% under the same circumstances.

Smooth evolution service capability

Huawei's LTE bearer network evolution service makes comprehensive use of experts, global experience, workflows, IT tools, and Global Network Evolution & Experience Center (GNEEC) to enable efficient delivery.

Huawei has a lot of experts worldwide, including over 30 high-end SA’s, 300 project management professionals, 1,000 SA’s, and 8,000 professional service engineers to provide customers with customized services and comprehensive technical support. Moreover, Huawei has abundant platforms to support the operating of global projects, including three TSCs that can provide 24/7 services and six multilingual training centers. Besides, Huawei has powerful professional tools such as Unistar Planner and IP Evolution tools and state of the art GNEEC both of which efficiently accelerates network construction and ensures smooth evolution.