Mobile broadband is surpassing voice as an offering. Mobile operators need to quantify broadband customer's experience so they can improve customer care, manage network operations and investments, and invoke real-time service policy management. Operators need accurate, granular, fast, and scalable data packet inspection platform to monitor customer's Quality of Experience (QoE) across layers 2-7.

Operators have several options of how to collect QoE metrics. Today, every network element, every connection protocol, every signaling and user plane offers information. It is tempting to attempt to collect information from hundreds of sources. Many probe and deep packet inspection vendors offer these aggregation systems, but they all suffer from the same problems:

• inaccurate correlation of multiple data sources yields inaccurate latency and throughput KPIs
• limited visibility of user plane
• massive post-processing requirements of data that fails to scale

Velocent Systems' LexaVu achieves true end-to-end visibility and accuracy via a more elegant approach.

Accuracy

We start by inspecting the user's actual packets, not the signaling plane. If you want an accurate view of every user's actual experience, then tracking the user plane is a must. Velocent leads the industry in KPI design, ensuring that measurements metrics reflect actual Quality of Experience.

Granularity

LexaVu goes beyond sampling. The LexaVu reads every user's PDP context, updates, and service flow. KPIs are generated for 100% of users, 24x7 with high reliability. With this history, operators can accurately identify trends. They can also drill down to specific users and sessions impacted.

Scalablity

LexaVu taps into the mobile network at the GGSN, the most aggregated part of the mobile network. From this single point, it can provide achieve end-to-end visibility, avoiding the costly investment and maintenance associated with hundreds of probes further out in the network (e.g. IuPS, Iub). It passively monitors over 10Gbps per LexaVu, meaning a single LexaVu can often handle a single GGSN without disrupting the network.

Synchronized time and location

Because LexaVu reads from a single point in the network for all its data, its timestamping on all XDRs is accurate and consistent down to the microsecond. Time precision is critical for generating accurate measurements like Round Trip Time. It is also critical for aligning metrics across layers 2 through 7. Similarly, LexaVu extracts accurate and timely layer 2 about network elements in each session's path from the same data source. Because of this, time and location are exactly synchronized across all KPI, not a best-guess correlation that you will get from other vendors.

Real-time reporting

LexaVu reads the network at wire speeds and sends XDRs to the MiraVu analytic platform every five minutes. Therefore, OneVu solutions can send alarms and reports about network conditions as they occur.

Layer 7 option

In addition to layers 2-4 inspection, operators can opt for layer 7 KPIs. Layer 7 provides even more detailed information across 10 service categories, including video, audio, web browsing and peer-to-peer. Because of Velocent's patent-pending synchronization approach, layer 7 and layer 3-4 metrics can accurately be viewed in the same report. And like all Velocent's metrics, these can be filtered down to the network element, user, or device.

LexaVu Data Sheet pdf available to registered users.