by Marius Koegelenberg, Product Marketing Manager

Modern telecom networks need very high levels of availability to ensure business continuity whether it be mission critical networks carrying tele protection circuits, land mobile radio or even operator providing the best possible service to their customers.

Traditional approaches to improving Network Reliability

Telecoms network operators are striving to achieve the goal of 99.999% availability on an individual link basis, which translates to a mere 5 minutes of allowed downtime per year. To achieve this many operators add physical equipment protection in the form of N+N configurations and/or space diversity path protection. Techniques like adaptive modulation and automatic transmit power control have proven very successful in achieving more resilient networks by mitigating the adverse effects of radio propagation.

Whilst this protects the hardware and in some cases the path, the network management and monitoring aspect is often overlooked, not understood, or neglected causing operators to only react on active alarms exposing them to possible outages. In some cases, operators struggle with a lack of experienced personnel to be able to understand and prioritize alarms to trace the root cause and identify the corrective actions required.

Predictive Maintenance

In most industries it is well recognized that moving from a reactive approach to network maintenance to a more predictive or proactive model results in a significant improvement in network availability and customer satisfaction. This can also be more cost effective than traditional preventative approaches based on regular or routine maintenance and has been applied in other industries where predictive analytics improve performance by diagnosing up to 95% of issues before they impact operational efficiency, can result in a 2x reduction in downtime, and cut operating costs by an average of 30%.

Moving from a reactive to a more predictive maintenance model dramatically improves network reliability

Latent issues cause more outages

Without proactive and automatic microwave performance monitoring in place many latent issues remain unnoticed for prolonged periods of time, until they turn into problems that result in degraded network performance or at worst an outage. In many cases personnel responsible for the microwave network may not be aware of an issue until they receive a complaint from a customer or some other part of their network organization.

Even if problems do not result in an outcome as serious as an outage, link issues at the very least can often result in the link running at a capacity well below the design criteria, causing traffic congestion that could result in the operator increasing the capacity of the link (and purchasing additional licenses) when it is not needed, wasting their investment.

Assuring Network Health with Aviat HAS

Aviat has addressed these pains with our new Health Assurance Software (or HAS), which is designed specifically to give control back to operators. Creating a proactive/predictive approach to network maintenance with trend analysis, KPI monitoring and placing focus on where operators should be spending time to address network concerns.

Based on our experience and discussions with operators, we believe that HAS can deliver a 10% saving in capacity upgrades, a 2x reduction in downtime, and up to a 30% reduction in operating costs.

HAS is available as either a Aviat Hosted or Managed Service and uniquely simplifies the detection and analysis of RF anomalies and degradation of key performance indicators (KPIs). HAS focuses on 3 main KPI’s namely 1) Availability; 2) Utilization; and 3) Congestion.

HAS includes 7 path anomaly detection algorithms to proactively identify links that are operating in a degraded state:

• Advanced availability calculations
• XPIC cancellation
• Modulation availability
• Dribbling errors
• Extended fade
• Interference
• Operating in low modulation

Geographical Map

HAS is designed around a highly visual geographical map (geo-map). The Topology view in the map has several filters that allows the user with a single glance to see what is happening in their network. Fault correlation is greatly simplified with this bird’s eye view.

HAS Geo-Map

The user experience in HAS was crafted to be extremely intuitive to allow personnel of any skill level to navigate, detect and analyze offending links in the network.

Smart Panels

The introduction of smart panels that overlay on the map view with a single click and assist with accessing performance data whilst keeping focus on the links in the map view. These smart panels display all the key KPI’s including Availability, Utilization, Congestion and Performance Anomalies.

HAS Geo-Map with pop-out Smart Panel

Focus List to pinpoint most critical links

HAS introduces focus lists that provide customers with ranked list of the problematic links they see in the map to help to with where they need to spend their time. A consolidated view shows those links not performing to specification to allow for directed correction of network issues and to ensure ultimate control of which links get corrected first.