Thought-Leadership Paper:

Top 10 Technologies for Mobile Broadband Traffic Management

Published in May 2010, this is a concise, 24-page briefing on the technical options for managing traffic on 3G/4G networks. It follows from discussion on various Disruptive Wireless blog posts on the diverging solutions that are emerging for controlling the bandwidth consumption explosion.

Anyone working in the mobile industry over the past 18 months will have seen a very familiar chart, dozens or maybe hundreds of times: it has one line with data traffic volumes curving exponentially upwards, while another curve of revenues also shows growth, but at a much slower pace.

Disruptive Analysis believes that deployment of HSPA+ and LTE will help mobile operators ensure that future networks are capable of supporting lower costs per MB of data transferred, by increasing capacity and efficiency. But it is still critical to examine ways to reduce congestion on a shorter-term basis, to prevent congestion and customer dissatisfaction.

And even with future 3G / 4G capacity additions, the hunger from new applications - especially those based around video or other rich media - will demand strong discipline for optimisation.

This is a complex area - there are many ways to control traffic, or minimise its impact on the most expensive parts of the cellular network. There are arguments for offload to WiFi or femtocells, compression in the core network, or numerous forms of innovation for policy management and charging.

This thought-leadership paper explores 10 technologies for managing mobile data traffic - including offload, DPI, caching, content sharing and RAN signalling management.

It also examines some "starting point" recommendations for operators assessing their options for reducing traffic on congested networks, as well as discussing some of the most worrying operational and tactical pitfalls that may occur. There is no easy answer - the best approach will depend on the existing customer base and its behaviour, the mix of smartphones and laptops on the network, the operator's spectrum and cell site holdings..... and its forecasts and beliefs about the future.

In many operators, there is also an organisational and management problem: there is often no single individual who "owns" the issue of data traffic, who can develop a holistic solution. Instead, there are often diverse individuals who pursue narrow goals, which can have unintended consequences elsewhere in the network - or impacts customer experience.

In almost no operator is there an individual with the job title of "Policy Manager".

The report's Contents

Introduction

Proliferation of solutions vs. the need for holistic view

Initial recommendations & starting points for operators

1. WiFi Offload

2. Femtocell Offload

3. Radio network enhancements

Signalling management

Macro network offload

Radio packet scheduling and prioritisation

4. Compression, adaptation and transcoding

5. Device-based traffic management techniques

Compression

Rate-adaptation

Network-sharing

6. Contention management & tuning TCP/IP

7. Deep packet inspection, policy-based traffic shaping & differential charging

8. End-to-end service assurance and monitoring

9. Caching, multicast & CDNs

10. Congestion APIs

Top 10 challenges in mobile traffic management

Vendors

Background to this study

Who this document is intended for

What this document excludes

About Disruptive Analysis

(Note: this is not a full analyst "strategy report", but a short 24-page document to introduce the expanding variety of technical options emerging to solve the "capacity crunch". It does not include detailed analysis of vendor positions or the minutiae of architectures. Further details on business models are covered in other research reports)

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