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Posts Tagged ‘Accedian Networks’

July EtherNEWS – Case Study: Performance Assurance for Mobile Backhaul Networks

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

This Month’s Issue

Continually measuring the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) of the SLA’s being delivered in backhaul networks, is critical to the successful execution of the delivery of Ethernet mobile backhaul services. This month we’re excited to publish a case study of SureWest Communications experiences delivering their Wireless Carrier Backhaul Service to some of the top tier wireless operators. Performance assurance is a fundamental requirement for success in this growing market for Carrier Ethernet services and you’ll learn how SureWest evaluated the Accedian Networks Performance Assurance solution and hear about their experiences deploying it in their network to support both their Wireless Carrier Backhaul and business grade EtherMAN services.

Next up to help prepare for the migration to 4G LTE networks, Accedian has recently published our LTE Performance Assurance Handbook. The handbook provides a comprehensive look at the 4G network technology, architecture and components and examines the implications of each on the backhaul networks that will so critical to the successful migration to 4G. A short video will walk you through the contents and provide a preview of the technical content inside.

Finally, we’re proud to announce the General Availability of our much anticipated MetroNODE 10GE™ platform. Introduced several months ago, the MetroNode is the most powerful Performance Assurance Agent in the Accedian product family. This scalable, high performance NID is now available for deployment in a variety of demanding Performance Assurance applications.

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SureWest Case Study

Accedian recently announced during the Light Reading Mobile Backhaul Convergence Conference that SureWest Communications is deploying Accedian Network’s Performance Assurance Platform to ensure high quality service delivery for its Wireless Carrier Backhaul Ethernet-based mobile backhaul service.

Wireless Backhaul

The explosive growth of smart phones and mobile broadband devices, coupled with the deployment of next generation mobile broadband applications, is creating a demand for bandwidth that simply cannot be met using the legacy mobile backhaul networks. Existing wireless backhaul networks originally designed for voice have a typical capacity of 1-3 Megabits per cell site and do not accommodate the onslaught of broadband data traffic, where mobile operators are seeing demand for 10-50 Megabits per cell site. SureWest’s fiber and Ethernet-based networks in both the greater Sacramento and Kansas City regions are more than sufficient to meet this demand.

SureWest’s Wireless Carrier Backhaul is an Ethernet-based service that provides the capacity and performance needed for wireless operators to effectively deliver mobile broadband services. Delivering Ethernet mobile backhaul services can be challenging as the mobile network demands precise service quality. Monitoring latency, packet delay variation, packet loss and availability of mobile backhaul services is critical to successfully meeting the wireless operators’ needs and requires robust performance assurance to ensure that the mobile backhaul network meets these needs around the clock.

Wireless Backhaul

Before deploying the MetroNIDs in the SureWest network, SureWest compared them against a number of alternatives. The decision criteria included not only performance assurance monitoring and reporting features, but SureWest also compared performance, interface density and power consumption. All aspects for deploying the most efficient service performance infrastructure were evaluated.

For more insight into the innovative deployment of Accedian Networks’ Performance Assurance solution in SureWest’s Carrier Ethernet network, click here to download a copy of the full report.

LTE Handbook Overview

Watch an overview presentation of Accedian’s new LTE Performance Assurance Handbook which covers all aspects of LTE backhaul testing, monitoring, SLA reporting and maintenance. This comprehensive technical guide features detailed information on the performance requirements and objectives for successfully providing mobile backhaul services for LTE mobile platforms. It contains extensive references to ITU, IEEE and MEF standards along with in-depth explanations of key technologies are illustrated with extensive network and engineering diagrams.

Request your copy of the industry’s most comprehensive guide to LTE Backhaul testing – free to engineering & operations professionals while quantities last.

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The feature application video in this EtherNEWS edition is also available as a free Video Podcast. Download Now.

MetroNODE 10GE™ Packet Performance Node

Based on our customers’ input based on years of successful Carrier Ethernet Performance Assurance experience, Accedian is proud to announce the General Availability of newest product in the Accedian family, the MetroNODE 10GE™ packet performance node. This scalable, high performance product features a comprehensive blend of service assurance and service creation capabilities. The MetroNODE 10GE™ provides the same wire-speed, zero-latency performance as our existing products only now at 10 Gig.

With the ability to establish and maintain 1,000s of Y.1731 OAM connectivity fault management (CFM) and performance monitoring (PM) sessions, the MetroNODE 10GE™ is ideal for head-end service assurance functions for 3G & 4G mobile backhaul networks – allowing per-second, real-time visibility into SLAs and per-service QoS scaling to multiple service classes for hundreds of cell sites.

This much anticipated product is now available for deployment to meet your most demanding performance assurance applications.

10GE

Learn all about the MetroNODE 10GE with our quick intro video:

For more information about Accedian Networks solutions, please visit our document library on Accedian.com.

Financial IT Managers Ask for Microsecond Granularity

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Financial IT Managers Ask for Microsecond Granularity

The financial industry long has been a lead adopter of the latest technology innovations, and the quest for absolute low latency communications is among the latest areas where securities firms are pushing carriers and service providers for unheard-of latency performance.

At a conference sponsored by A-Team, financial industry information technology executives pointed out that they now are looking for transaction latency performance measured in microseconds. To put that in perspective, latencies on the best optical networks are measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second).

Asked what might be possible in the relatively near future, though not necessarily as a market-available product today, Jock Percy, Perseus Telecom CEO, suggested it might be possible to get to 14 milliseconds on the New York to Chicago route; 64 milliseconds across the Atlantic or 95 milliseconds from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Keep in mind that financial IT executives were asking for performance in microseconds, roughly three orders of magnitude more stringent than those metrics.

Even on the fastest networks, it takes seven milliseconds for data to travel between the New York and Chicago markets, one way, and 35 milliseconds between the West and East coasts. For that reason, many broker-dealers and execution-services firms are paying premiums to place their servers inside the data centers of Nasdaq and the NYSE.

Though some executives suggested much of the latency actualy was caused by applications, servers and other hardware, carrier executives said one obvious way to reduce latency in transmission links was to select the shortest routes. Some providers have an easier time of it.

John Knuff, Equinix general manager pointed out that one additional way to limit latency is to avoid placing any network gear between one firm and a trading partner. For Equinex, that means connecting trading partners within a single collocation facility.

That’s good advice even for a local, regional or international link as well, says Accedian Networks VP Scott Sumner. “Whenever possible, you want to eliminate as many active elements as possible,” he says.

But is is not often possible to connect every trading partner within a single facility. When physical collocation is not possible, RCN Metro has to figure out what locations are key to those trading partners, and make sure it has high-capacity and direct links between those locations, says Mary Stanhope, RCN Metro senior director. “Then you groom the circuits between the locations,” she says.

“After making sure you have the shortest-possible route, you also can take advantage of tweaking the dispersion compensation method, for example,” says Ernie Hoffmann, Optimum Lightpath VP.

“Network design also plays a role,” says Percy. Also, “it’s easier if the transport is at layer one instead of layer two,” says Hoffmann.

In fact, some customers now are asking for latency measurements made every second on a communications path, says Hoffmann.

Others note that measurements made as often as every tenth of a second likely will be requested. One issue financial IT staffs now are attempting to grapple with are microbursts of data that temporarily cause huge spikes in bandwidth demand.

An example is the start of a trading day, when networks are hit with a flood of orders that have been queueing up since the night before.

To analyze performance issues, network managers often have to break out a one-second period into 100 millisecond intervals, 10 millisecond intervals, or 5 microsecond intervals for investigations.

A sub-second period where a major burst of traffic occurs is known as a microburst.

Some communication executives will point out that such microburst problems can be avoided if there is enough bandwidth on a link, or even when “bursting” features are available on a connection. The issue, as always, is the balance between latency performance and bandwidth cost.

“After making sure you have the shortest-possible route, you also can take advantage of tweaking the dispersion compensation method, for example,” says Ernie Hoffmann, Optimum Lightpath VP.

“Network design also plays a role,” says Percy. Also, “it’s easier if the transport is at layer one instead of layer two,” says Hoffmann.

In fact, some customers now are asking for latency measurements made every second on a communications path, says Hoffmann.

An example is the start of a trading day, when networks are hit with a flood of orders that have been queueing up since the night before.

To analyze performance issues, network managers often have to break out a one-second period into 100 millisecond intervals, 10 millisecond intervals, or 5 microsecond intervals for investigations.

A sub-second period where a major burst of traffic occurs is known as a microburst.

by Gary Kim

Tags: Accedian Networks, Equinix, low latency, Optimum Lightpath, Perseus Telecom, RCN Metro
Posted in News | 12 Comments »

Scaling 3G & LTE: SOAM Issues

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

We recently caught up with Craig Easley, president of the Carrier Ethernet Academy and board member of the MEF, at CTIA 2010 in Las Vegas. Craig was at the conference to provide training for Ethernet mobile backhaul operators’ engineering staff as they prepared to roll-out large-scale 3G & LTE services (watch a video replay of this 30 minute class). One focus of the session was the challenges providers face when implementing Y.1731 Service Operations, Administration & Maintenance (SOAM) to monitor and manage Quality of Service (QoS) in these performance-critical, all-packet backhaul networks. Following is a short dialog between Craig and Patrick Ostiguy, President & CEO of Accedian Networks, who provide service assurance equipment to leading backhaul deployments to both mobile operators and wholesale backhaul providers.

Speakers:

speakercea

[CE] Craig Easley, President, Carrier Ethernet Academy

[PO] Patrick Ostiguy, President & CEO, Accedian Networks

[CE] If you received a new software release from your favorite switch vendor that supports this connectivity check messages (CCM), they can be configured just to run end-to-end and so you have only two points in the network actually sending and receiving the CCMs, or you can configure them to be processed by each inner management entity as well to provide complete path-performance information.

If you do that at a high enough level of granularity, it’s possible to actually flood the processing of the equipment that’s in the middle in such a way that you get a false positive that you have a problem. Your data traffic isn’t being processed and handled by every one of those interim points, but the connectivity check messages are. They are being read and time-stamped and then forwarded along. And if an intermediate switch is overrun with time-stamping of connectivity check messages, the accuracy will be off and the operator might think there’s a latency problem – when in fact the end-to-end latency of the actual data itself is within spec.

[PO] The sheer amount of OEM sessions that Mobile backhaul is faced with when implementing these standards is creating this very interesting challenge right now. These providers deliver 3 to 4 classes of service per tower and also want to have an OAM Performance Monitoring (PM) session for each of those classes in addition to a CCM continuity check message session going to each of those towers every second.

So considering that you can have 200+ of thoe towers being served by a single Mobile Switching Center (MSC), it rapidly increases the amount of OAM sessions you are dealing with. So, converging at the MSC you can easily have 1000+ sessions that have to be terminated at a critical aggregation and hand-off location – typically served by a 10 GigE link. That is extremely dense, even for the “big iron” switch-routers that are out there from the big vendors.

[CE] This is something that people are just starting to wrestle with: essentially, all of the big equipment manufacturers are releasing support for OAM – some are releasing new hardware to go along with it, but most are just doing it in software. And if you just have OAM capability in software there is only certain amount of compute power in those switches that are already deployed. So the good news is: it’s a software upgrade, you don’t have to deploy anything new. The bad news is: you may be pouring a little bit “too much sand in the bucket” and exhausting the capability of the switch.

[PO] Like Craig suggests, this level of processing cannot be done by software running on the routers’ existing cards. In that context our customers have asked us to develop a product to alleviate this problem by providing a pure hardware based design that is independent of traffic load and can therefore handle thousands of OAM sessions, while offering microsecond precision one-way measurements. The beauty of this new product, the MetroNODE 10GE, is that because it is Y.1731 standards-based, it allows the operator to test performance to each and every tower, whether the cell site employs dedicated hardware such as NIDs, or uses cell-site routers or base stations supporting this OAM standard.

[CE] Agreed. More and more people, I believe, will deploy special purpose network interface devices like the Accedian units to make sure that they get accurate data coming back from the network in terms of the SLA, especially in mission-critical and ‘zero tolerance for error’ latency environments like mobile backhaul.

You can watch a more detailed overview at Accedian.com/10, or watch the CTIA training session by Craig Easley at Accedian.com/cea-ctia.

Tags: 3g, 4g, Accedian Networks, backhaul, CFM, Ethernet, lte, Maintenance, OAM, Operations, performance, Performance Monitoring, Service Assurance, sla, SLA Assurance, wimax, wireless backhaul, y.1731
Posted in Applications, Opinion, Solutions | 6 Comments »

(Accedian Networks') EtherNEWS Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Accedian Networks’

July EtherNEWS – Case Study: Performance Assurance for Mobile Backhaul Networks

Financial IT Managers Ask for Microsecond Granularity

Scaling 3G & LTE: SOAM Issues

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