RAD dines on mobile backhaul demand as capacity crunch bites

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL: RAD Data Communications today announced it has seen a major increase in demand for its backhaul solutions due to unprecedented mobile broadband usage.

The company has scored backhaul equipment wins with seven major tier-one European carriers in 2009 with several extending across numerous national markets. RAD has also outlined the nature of the LTE backhaul challenge which will require a significant intelligence shift to the cell-site to support the all-IP backhaul architecture.

RAD’s operator deployments include several of Europe’s earliest all-IP backhaul networks which required resolving the synchronisation challenge -- the single greatest obstacle to next generation backhaul deployments. All-IP networks are inherently unreliable for clock recovery or distribution and unless synchronisation technologies are implemented, calls are dropped and hand-overs are fumbled.

The company also outlined how LTE backhaul networks are going to need to be significantly smarter than their 3G predecessors to effectively manage traffic performance in a disruptive partial mesh architecture; to provide accurate timing; adequate resiliency and QoS for critical applications; to enable backward compatibility for 2G and 3G service continuity; and to accommodate the surge in traffic rates.

“For so many years backhaul was an afterthought –- now it is the single biggest challenge in mobile. Rocketing traffic has hit operators’ backhaul networks hardest making 2009 the year when change really started to happen,” said Ronen Guri, RAD Data Communication’s Director Product Management and Business Development for Mobile Backhaul.

“As we look towards 2010 and the early LTE deployments, the real backhaul challenge is going to move from being a “capacity crunch, which will be addressed by fibre and microwave, to being an “intelligence crunch”. It is now clear that for the access segment, LTE deployments will require price-sensitive intelligent cell-site demarcation gateways and aggregation devices with end-to-end performance measurement tools, sophisticated traffic management capabilities and support for various synchronisation and timing schemes. Despite their sophistication, eNodeBs will not be flexible enough to address this degree of backhaul complexity.”

LTE networks present numerous challenges to mobile backhaul. The introduction of a partial mesh RAN architecture means each base station will now directly connect to up to 32 neighbours, through the X2 interface, while the evolution to all-IP also presents numerous challenges. RAD’s LTE backhaul gateway and aggregation devices support the VPN connectivity required to meet the X2 interface challenge head-on.

The gateway also features a sophisticated service delivery and SLA assurance platform, together with a full suite of synchronisation and timing over packet technologies – a powerful combination that marries intelligence with capacity to allow operators and carriers to lower their LTE backhaul TCO while ensuring customized SLA performance, advanced traffic management and optimal use of network resources. This allows operators to transport all types of traffic and rich multimedia applications with differentiated QoS and Five Nines reliability.

The gateway’s variety of timing standards includes 1588v2, Synch-E and other synchronization feature sets to ensure that real-time services, such as voice and media streaming, aren’t impacted by the move to an all-IP network. This also allows third party transport providers to carry traffic from different mobile operators regardless of which timing technology the mobile operators are using.