IP Mediation Branches Out to Network Management

IP mediation’s early success hinged on VoIP, fax over IP and usage-based billing. However, since it has become apparent that usage-based billing will not overtake all-you-can-eat pricing in the consumer world right away, the role mediation systems play within the network has started to expand into network management, performance analysis and capacity planning.

“There is still a lot of uncertainty among providers that usage-based billing models are the way to go,” says John Aalbers, director of mediation business for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Intec Telecom Systems. “The carriers have heard a lot of talk about complex, usage-based, cross-service billing models, but these ideas have been put forward primarily by billing vendors, who have a vested interest in making things more complicated. Until the operators see proof that usage-based billing is a key differentiator, the industry will be slow to adopt the model.”

Companies that built their names in IP mediation, though, claim usage-based billing is gaining converts. The growth, they say, isn’t among consumers but from broadband providers, mobile operators and wholesale carriers. Content mediation, Web hosting, video-on-demand and data streaming are all services that could require IP mediation.

“All of our customers are doing some level of usage-based billing,” says Anil Uberoi, senior vice president of marketing and corporate business development at Xacct. “Some customers are ISPs, and some are doing carrier-to-carrier billing, measuring volume and separating VoIP traffic from text traffic. And they are applying usage for business services, like VPNs.”

Cable operators, says Dana Kreitter, marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard’s Internet Usage Manager, are another group showing interest in IP mediation. “Usage-based billing has hardly gone by the wayside,” he says, “especially in the broadband market.” Kreitter cites Excite@Home, Covad, Telstra and Telewest as HP customers considering migrating to tiered pricing.

The mediation companies expect mobile operators moving into 2.5G and 3G services to also be a factor in their future. But to interest a cross-section of providers—cable, mobile, DSL and ISPs—in usage-based billing, operators must develop a stronger set of appealing services. To date, most industry watchers claim the lack of interesting services has halted IP mediation and usage-based billing’s progress.

“The delay has been in marketing not coming up with viable products,” says Kim Cole, a principal with TMNG. “The mediation tools can go well beyond reading log files. They are sophisticated enough to pull various combinations of correlated records for downstream processing. The problem is that no one has defined what type of records they truly want or developed services that create demand.”

Expanding IP Mediation’s

OSS Role

With usage-based billing virtually on hold, IP mediation providers are shifting mediation, which traditionally was applied only to billing, to network management.

TTI Telecom is a strong advocate of expanding mediation’s role in an IP environment, especially into network management. IP mediation can collect any number of network parameters and traps to reflect performance, degradation and faults.

“IP mediation can be the single point of contact for the entire network,” says Assaf Landau, IP and data solutions manager at TTI Telecom. “We are seeing operators use our tools to police the network, because as a management system it provides a consolidated, centralized reporting mechanism.”

Narus has been promoting IP mediation’s ability to improve business intelligence and provide historical analysis. “We have worked diligently to make the mediation layer more configurable and to design a flexible engine,” says Sue Forbes, vice president of solutions marketing and business development at Narus. “The engine can pick up network elements from voice or data, transmit the data bi-directionally, enforce policies, as well as do high-performance calculations. With these additions, mediation expands beyond billing into CRM, fraud management and QoS.”

Forbes cites destination-sensitive billing as a significant new way carriers are using IP mediation. Backbone carriers can break out traffic based on long-haul rates and local rates to create more competitive prices and higher return on investments.

“Mediation gives the operators the data they need to move from offering a single rate to multiple rates,” explains Forbes. “Two years ago, no one would have considered this different price structure, but IP mediation has enabled these carriers to be more competitive.”

Openet Telecom has watched its customers come up with creative uses for IP data designed to help build customer loyalty. One operator uses IP statistics to create usage reports for business customers to measure bandwidth usage. The carrier shares these reports with its business customers and makes recommendations for different plans depending on whether the customer’s usage was suboptimal or nearing the upper threshold.

Another trend for IP metrics noted by Openet is the collection of email transactions, says Bob Hales, vice president of North American marketing. In Europe ISPs must store transactions records up to two years for the use of government or security agencies. Openet has worked with an Italian customer to capture these records so that an agency can search for email recipients and senders.

These records don’t show what was in the email, explains Hales, but they do reveal that person A sent an email to persons X, Y and Z. The log may also show that X, Y and Z responded to the original sender. If these senders and recipients are associated with a crime a few days later, these transactions could link the participants.

“This activity requires collection, storage and mining,” says Hales. “Our throughput capacity, sophisticated searching tools, and ability to quickly review mountains of data and find specific IPDRs for IP transactions, allow us to support operators with these types of needs.”

Xacct has also found that operators are interested in using data for systems unrelated to billing. Within Genuity’s network, Xacct is used for traffic engineering and analysis of usage patterns and network behavior. Instead of billing metrics, the mediation tool identifies call quality, latency and clusters of usage.

While most of these examples illustrate post-event reporting, Hutchinson 3G is using Intec before the event occurs for prepaid data accounts. The mediation tool intercepts events trafficked among their third-party content providers. “When a user makes a request for content, the mediation platform intercepts the request,” explains Aalbers at Intec. “If the operator has a relationship with the content provider, we will get pricing information, identify the subscriber, find out the subscriber’s credit, reserve credit, and then ask the subscriber through the handheld device if they want to continue with the purchase. If yes, we put the whole transaction in motion. We generate a post-event record, handle all the up-front prepaid requirements and create a billing record to pass on to the revenue-sharing platform. The revenue for that transaction is then divided among the partners.”

Openet’s Hales sees this pre-event activity as a growing trend for IP mediation. Three customers are using his company’s mediation platform for similar purposes. “We have adapted our product to support mediation of authentication, authorization and accounting to handle prepaid data. We help ensure that the transaction is made on a real-time basis.”

To Probe or Not To Probe

Two years ago IP mediation companies bickered over the best means to gather data from the network. Are probes the surest method to measure usage as the traffic passes, or is it better to have agents poll the elements directly? Rather than identifying a clear winner, IP mediation companies decided to adopt both approaches.

“There’s no reason to bank on one horse,” says Aalbers. “A lot of different techniques are available, and we want to be able to support all of them.”

This open attitude is a far cry from the IP mediation companies’ early stance. Xacct was a staunch defender of agents, and Narus fell strongly behind probes. Question either of the companies now and they wave the old argument off. “Two or three years ago that question was of interest,” says Xacct’s Uberoi, “but not now.”

The point is moot, explains TMNG’s Cole, because “there is no right or wrong way to gather metrics. Companies need a combination of approaches, because in some cases it makes sense for a probe to go into the packet. It’s not needed for everything, though, so companies need a hybrid approach.”

Openet’s Hales states that probes are rarely used now. “Probes are only useful when the content in the packet is important, maybe to discover what is in an email. We rarely find valid demand for probes.”

In general, the mediation players agree that probes provide more accurate usage information, but they are much more expensive to deploy than software agents. The best means to gather the data, however, is to capture information directly from the network element, which has gotten easier recently.

“The newer elements expose a lot more granular information that wasn’t available in early IP networks,” says Uberoi. “We are finding that we don’t need to sniff off the wire, because the elements expose the necessary accounting metrics.”

The mediation companies use the hardware vendors’ protocols to collect information. The elements deposit event records every few minutes, usually in ASCII, XML or ASN.1, and the mediation platform typically gathers the metrics using FTP over TCP/IP, if the data is file-based.

This method is much more reliable than gathering data about the elements using SNMP, and when combined with probes and software agents, the mediation companies claim they have 100 percent visibility into the network.

Initiating this openness has not been easy. IP’s early architecture was not billing-friendly. “IP grew out of academia and military,” notes Intec’s Aalbers. “For these groups billing was not important. The early elements provided very primitive information, but we have seen the network elements evolve to become much more billing-friendly. Equipment providers are much more prone to be open and publish interface specifications, because they realize the value of extracting information for the billing systems.”

Intec and the other mediation companies have also done a good job educating new and old network equipment providers. “We spend a lot of time working with companies to help them understand what we need and explain our understanding of the BSS,” says HP’s Kreitter. “We help them understand what type of information they need to expose.”

Isolating the metrics

IP mediation platforms can collect any number of metrics, which the provider can apply to usage-based billing, traffic analytics or operational planning. The parameters of interest vary depending on how it will use the metrics.

For billing, the mediation platforms capture information relating to data volume, specific services accessed, jitter, retransmissions, broken transfers that must be restarted, and multimedia downloads, explains Kreitter. When measuring VoIP, the platforms look at traditional fields, such as start and stop time, origination, destination, duration and quality of service. Other metrics of interest are network overtime and subscriber counts.

TTI has designed an Enhanced Detail Record to capture additional customer, device and network parameters. Landau says it includes usage information, time, date, customer name, address, telephone number, the device ID, software version, device location—practically anything in the database.

For customer analytics, IP mediation is often used to show that a small percentage of customers are consuming a large percentage of the network. Kreitter says HP recommends that once these bandwidth hogs are identified operators should move them to usage-based or tiered services.

The third area, operational planning, is not devoted to individual subscriber details but to overall network performance. These metrics can be used for capacity planning exercises to improve network loads and design least-cost routing.

Once the mediation platform gathers the metrics, the data is aggregated, correlated or concatenated. Martin Demers, chief marketing officer at Ace-Comm, explains the difference among the three types of collection and analysis.

Aggregation pieces together all the records from the network element by communication. Correlation provides a network perspective, comparing router information with data from the proxy server, softswitch or video server to provide an overall network view. Concatenation provides a summary of services, and is used when the operator doesn’t need granular information about individual communications.

In a mobile environment, the mediation platform must gather connection time, usage, quality of service data, content information, subscriber ID, URL and email, and identify the application. The biggest problem, though, is that the data comes from multiple sources. In addition to the routers and softswitches, the mediation platform must gather metrics from the DNS, proxy and application servers.

In a fixed IP environment, the mediation platform can be used to police the network. It can root out policy abusers, bottlenecks, denial of service attacks and spam generators.

Centralized or Distributed Architectures?

An operator that invests in IP mediation must decide whether to deploy it under a centralized or distributed architecture. Carrier size, current network architecture and internal IT philosophy influence the final outcome.

Every mediation company recommends using a distributed architecture, but carriers often cannot because of the additional costs and challenges. “Operators attempt to collect data locally from their distributed equipment, but most of their management systems and mediation is still centralized,” explains Carmody Quinn, Network Management Systems consultant at Openet. “It’s best to distribute management, mediation and knowledge as close to the equipment as possible, but it’s extremely expensive, and most service providers don’t want to invest in something that won’t result in an immediate return on investment.”

The mediation companies advise that the best method is to aggregate events locally and send a summary to the central repository. This prevents mediation from becoming a bottleneck. “Distributing the aggregation process,” says Ace-Comm’s Demers, “minimizes the amount of data sent downstream. It’s always best to aggregate locally when feasible.”

Cost typically prevents operators from creating a distributed architecture, but the mediation providers claim hardware costs are decreasing, down to $1,000 per box, and that efficiencies gained from the investment will make up for the initial costs. “If distributed correctly, operators will save costs by improving performance,” says TTI’s Landau.

Current Market Prospects

In today’s economic environment, mediation companies are having a hard time convincing service providers to invest in their platforms. Both parties need 2.5G and 3G mobile services to stop their revenue reports from flat-lining, but the uptake for these new offerings is still slow.

“Everyone is looking at IP mediation in terms of return on investment,” says Ace-Comm’s Demers. “When you go on a sales tour and ask service providers how much money they are making on mobile services, they are lucky to get $100 from the services. Operators in Canada are only getting from 400 to a few thousand events a day. There’s not a lot of revenue to be derived at this moment, and really no need to process data if they are only getting one or two records.”

For now, Forbes claims that most operators are coping with homegrown mediation systems, but they are being pushed toward third-party systems to help decrease revenue leakage. Xacct’s Uberoi adds that many companies have decided to deploy IP mediation, but they haven’t created a time line for the project.

“The motivation to invest in mediation is not that compelling now,” he says. “Everyone is waiting for 2003 to be a better year. The service providers know they will have to add mediation and they have plans to invest, but they won’t make the final decision for at least six months.”

Even analysts agree that the sector is stronger than it appears. According to TMNG’s Cole, the slow adoption rate has given the mediation companies and the service providers the opportunity to refine their technology and services. “The market looks more depressed than it truly is,” he says. “Service providers are ready to get on the bandwagon, and the delay hasn’t hurt them. Instead, the lag ensured that everyone is prepared to handle the deluge when it finally comes. And it will come.”

In the mean time, the mediation vendors are seeing RFPs for converged voice and IP platforms. Cost reduction and efficiency are driving this trend.

“Our customers are requiring a truly convergent mediation platform to cover all their networks—circuit, IP and mobile,” says HP’s Kreitter. “Now we are bidding on voice mediation as often as we are bidding on IP mediation, based on a single platform. The operators hope that these upgrades will wring out operating costs in large-scale environments.”

All the mediation developers offer universal platforms at this point, and they claim convergence is a must-have. “At this point, a universal platform is almost a condition for doing business. Service providers want to collect CDRs from 2G, TDM and IP networks,” says Uberoi. “They want a single record for voice and data. This change is the future for 2003 and 2004.”