Instead of tracking total data use, Alcatel-Lucent looks at how data isused

Alcatel-Lucent took the wraps off of a wireless network data traffic management solution today squarely targeted at a problem that hasn’t yet become big in the industry but potentially could become an enormous issue for wireless networks: the lack of visibility into how customers are using data connections.

The solution, called the Alcatel-Lucent Wireless Network Guardian, is the first network management platform that distinguishes between the types of traffic traversing their networks and their impact on airtime instead of merely the overall packet load. The difference is subtle but critical, said Mike Schabel, who heads up Aware, the Alcatel-Lucent Ventures project that built the platform.

While operators have decried bandwidth-hogging applications such as video streaming and peer-to-peer, they actually have a relatively small effect on the performance of the overall network, Schabel said. The real culprits are applications that transmit and receive little data but are constantly signaling the network, particularly push e-mail services like Research-in-Motion’s BlackBerry.

The typical BlackBerry will download a miniscule amount of data over the course of the day, but the way push e-mail is designed, there is a constant stream of signaling traffic over the network, as the device is constantly updating the server of its location and sending requests for new messages. Over a wireline network, individual users have dedicated pipes to the Internet or their corporate servers, but the wireless network is shared, containing both a capacity component and an airtime component, Schabel said. Customers aren’t just splitting the overall capacity of a cell sector; they’re also competing for individual channels.

“A BlackBerry may receive only 1 MB of data per day, but it will use 2 hours of airtime and produce 1020 individual signaling events,” Schabel said. In contrast, a peer-to-peer application uses network resources much more efficiently, Schabel said. To send a 1 MB file, it opens a channel, transmits the file, closes the channel and then goes dormant. The same 1 MB of information only uses 30 seconds of airtime, Schabel said.

There is already evidence that the popularity of push messaging has caused network disruptions around the world, and these disruptions will probably increases as BlackBerry and other push e-mail services continue. But most operators aren’t aware that its push e-mail signals are causing the disruptions. In fact, many operators have been quick to target bandwidth-intensive applications such as video streaming as culprits. For laptop connectivity services, several operators have tried to set limits on what kind of applications can be used over their 3G networks or placed outright caps on data usage.

The problem with this kind of approach, Schabel said, is that large amounts of data consumption don’t necessarily create problems with the network. A remote laptop user remaining connected to a corporate server can tax far more network resources by maintaining constant channel over the network even though the data sent over that channel is negligible, he said. The bottom line, according to Schabel: Operators can’t plan their networks and service plans only taking overall data usage into account. They have to identify what applications are draining both airtime and capacity, then plan and set policies accordingly, he said. “The sky’s not coming down right now, but if we don’t take a pause to understand what is going on in the network, there will be major disruptions in the future.”

Alcatel-Lucent has already landed one named customer for the Network Guardian, Bell Canada, which is actively using the platform to monitor traffic in its data network. As it stands now, the Guardian is more a passive monitoring tool. It can identify problems in the network using deep packet inspection (DPI) at critical nodes in the network. Carriers can use that data to set policies for users, adjust their service pricing plans or identify particularly troublesome users on the network, but as of yet, it has no active component. However, Schabel said the Aware project is working with Alcatel-Lucent’s network product divisions to integrate the Network Guardian into a more active management platform, one that could possibly redistribute airtime channels or limit capacity to individual users on the fly at problem spots in the network.

The Aware project is Alcatel-Lucent Ventures’ third to reach the market. Last year, another venture, Evros, launched the OmniAccess Laptop Guardian, and another group produced the OmniAccess Web Services Gateway. All three projects started in Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs research division but had no direct correlation to an Alcatel-Lucent product division. Bell Labs president Jeong Kim established Alcatel-Lucent Ventures as a way of reversing the historical disconnect with Bell Labs and its owner. Instead of abandoning promising research because it didn’t have a direct outlet in one of the business units, a venture is created to develop a product and market it. (See Telephony’s feature series Bell Labs: Reviving an Icon).

Alcatel-Lucent first gave a sneak peak of the Network Guardian solution at Mobile World Congress last month, but it plans to show off the first commercial implementation of the platform at CTIA Wireless next month.