The emergence of 3.5G and LTE/4G mobile technologies and mobile-enabled applications and services is placing increasing demands on the backhaul and mobile packet core. Maintaining subscriber quality of experience (QoE) is increasingly difficult under these demanding conditions. Outages, poor performance and lack of scalability result in decreased revenue and an increase in lost customers.

The most innovative mobile backhaul networks combine IP, TDM, and ATM networks into a single Ethernet backhaul network. These converged backhaul networks can transport traffic that uses multi-layer protocols, so service providers need to test protocol interactions and determine how any problems on one network layer could effect the others.

Will your network:

• Scale to meet the capacity and performance required for demanding and complex mobile traffic?
• Process millions of calls during activation, deactivation, and hand-off?
• Maintain high quality of service with various access models?
• Sustain high quality of service with redundancy and high availability?

The end-to-end wireless network is now a complex mix of voice, video, text, web traffic, email, gaming and presence applications. To validate your solution, your test bed must reproduce the complexity and scale of a real network. If your test system can’t deliver this level of realism, you can’t have the assurance that the system will perform in a real network.

Ross Cassan discusses some of the issues affecting Mobile Backhaul at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas. Watch the video courtesy of TMCnet.