SmartCM
(RAN Configuration Management)
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:
- Are you confident your radio network is configured as you intended? Misconfiguration is one of the primary causes of poor network performance.
- Are you able to identify network configuration issues which could be causing a loss of revenue?
- Are you confident that the network changes suggested by your planning and optimization solutions have been correctly implemented in the network? If not the investment in these tools is being wasted.
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.
Improve your network operations with SmartCM
- SmartCM provides visibility into the configuration health of your radio access network. By understanding the impact of network misconfiguration, monitoring mean time to resolution of critical revenue affecting configuration problems and auditing managed service providers for configuration accuracy and roll-out SLA compliance.
- Tight control of your configuration management delivers a stable Radio Access Network. This provides improved quality of experience (QoE)) to subscribers reducing churn and improving ARPU due to increased network usage. Additional cost savings result from reduced call center volumes and savings on subscriber acquisition costs.
- A SaaS solution model ensures the latest features and vendor interfaces are always available and significantly reduces administration overheads.
Deliver Improved Engineering Efficiency with SmartCM
- Networks today are too big and too complex to be managed manually, an intelligent tool is required to identify and prioritize configuration problems with access to configuration management data on all vendor and technologies in a single solution.
- Proactive information delivery via reports and dashboards improves mean time to resolution which means engineers spend less time troubleshooting and have more time to focus on optimizing the network.
- Data filtering shows you only the information you are interested in, helping to highlight the key issues at a glance. While automation of mundane tasks frees up engineering time for more interesting work.
- SmartCM supports multiple vendor equipment software releases concurrently, and is therefore fully capable of managing the network during software upgrade projects.
Use case highlights include:
Network configuration monitoring
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.
Investigate performance problems on specific entities
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.
Resolve configuration discrepancies and write changes back to the network
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.
Create business rules and templates for efficient network configuration
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.
