Planning &
Optimization

As new technologies and equipment are introduced into networks, the accuracy and validation of Radio Access Network (RAN) configuration changes are critical to ensure healthy network operations and excellent customer quality of experience.
When it comes to RAN configuration management:
SmartCM was built to address these and many other configuration management challenges.
SmartCM maintains network integrity by automating the monitoring, auditing, updating and reporting on network configuration. It enables engineers to monitor and improve network quality by providing visibility to the live network configuration. With upwards of 5000 parameter settings on a base station, manually finding the misconfigured settings is almost impossible. SmartCM audits the live network configuration against a target-state Plan network baseline and highlights configuration discrepancies – a primary cause of poor network performance. It ensures network integrity is maintained by continuously auditing and monitoring changes made to the network by engineers, tools and even managed service providers.
At its heart, SmartCM is two databases, a baseline Plan network as per customer templates, golden parameter values and business rules built from planning tool, inventory and other master data sources, and a Live network built from live network data imports. It is vendor and technology-agnostic and supports GSM, UMTS and LTE network infrastructure and radio technologies from the major network equipment vendors. As SmartCM has been architected as a technology agnostic solution, it is ready for 5G. All that is required is creation of 5G specific business logic and rules, and the relevant 5G vendor interfaces.
Use case highlights include:
Dashboards deliver an ‘at-a-glance’ snapshot of the network configuration health with key metrics such as data completeness and integrity as well as discrepancy summaries. All dashboard widgets are interactive and can be drilled into for further investigation of the data underlying the stats.
Reports provide the next level of detail on metrics such as discrepancies and business rule violations. Users can also create reports customized to their exact needs. All reports and dashboards are fully interactive. Users can drill down on any item in a dashboard or report to find more information. Report creation and distribution can be scheduled and automated delivering information directly to a user’s email inbox.
When troubleshooting performance problems on the network, users can browse the Live and Plan networks and inspect network entities and their parameter settings. Entities are color coded based on the severity of the discrepancies and exceptions which exist on them making finding issues simple. By browsing to a entity, a user can immediately see the entity relations, what discrepancies exist on the entity, if any business rules are being violated. All changes that have been made on all entities are visible via the full history log.
A key capability of SmartCM is identifying all configuration discrepancies between the Plan network (the desired baseline) and the Live network. All network discrepancies are presented in a single view with intuitive filtering and drill down navigation to make resolution as simple as possible. Discrepancies are recalculated with every synchronized change from internal or external configuration sources. Network write capabilities enable the generation of network data transcripts to update the network and resolve discrepancies. This automated process ensures all associated changes are taken care of in addition to the change required and no human error is introduced when updating the network.
Business rules ensure network configuration rules are adhered to when optimization changes are made. These rules might be specific to an equipment vendor or an operator. They could be things such as PCI clashes with immediate/co-sited neighbor in the live LTE network or when the maximum number of permitted neighbors per cell has been exceeded.
Templates enable the rapid configuration of entities. Each template contains the default parameter settings for those entities. Templates can be assigned to a vendor/technology, entity type, physical group (all cells on an RNC) or user group (all cells in a town). Creating and maintaining the Plan network is greatly simplified through the use of templates.
If you would like to learn more about SmartCM please contact us today.