Brochure

VIAVIMobile AssuranceCentralized Roaming Management System (CRMS)

2 Mobile Assurance — Centralized Roaming Management System

Features

• All key inbound and outbound roaming procedures are monitored for 2G/3G voice, 2G/3G SMS, and 2G/3G/LTE data services

• 24x7, real-time KPI generation quickly detects all roaming faults whenever and wherever they happen

• Unique Alarmogram web-browser screen highlights and ranks faults through color coding

• Time Series charts detail what a roaming fault is and how many subscribers are affected

• Only three mouse clicks get the user from fault notification to detailed diagnosis via the Session Trace application’s transaction tracing

• Advanced reporting platform for historical trending and analysis

• Cost-effectively scales to maintain 100% coverage as roaming-subscriber count and traffic ramps

Protecting High-Value Roaming Services/Customers

International roaming customers have a far higher average revenue per user (ARPU) than their local-only voice and data counterparts, but their acquisition costs are also higher. As a mobile operator, the last thing you want is for these customers not being able to use your roaming services, or worse, churning. A major cause of churn is poor quality of service, so fast visibility of roaming outages affecting these customers is vital, especially if they are corporate clients.

Successful roaming depends on the reliable operation of multiple mobile networks. As a consequence, without appropriate tools it typically takes a long time to detect, localize, and troubleshoot international roaming problems. Also, the ability to quickly know all the customers who are being impacted by roaming issues before they complain/churn lets a mobile operator become more proactive in managing their subscribers’ experience and protecting revenues. And, with international services typically contributing 15 to 20 percent of total revenues, roaming customers generate a high proportion of operators’ profits.

CRMS delivers an objective and honest view of service performance as experienced by roaming subscribers, helping operators to detect problems fast and reduce MTTR.

Improving the quality of national and international roaming is a top priority of all mobile operators. By monitoring traffic at interconnect points for signaling and user data, the VIAVI CRMS solution provides a comprehensive view of roaming performance via an easy-to-use, web-browser interface. CRMS delivers an objective and honest view of service performance as experienced by roaming subscribers, helping operators to detect problems fast and reduce MTTR. By fixing problems before roaming subscribers are aware of any issues, CRMS helps operators reduce their churn rates as well as maximize revenues.

CRMS Benefits

Maximize Revenues• Pinpoint the precise details of roaming-service

failures to minimize service outages and their revenue impact

Raise Satisfaction Levels• Resolve many roaming service issues before

the customer is aware of their existence

Lower Operational Costs• Enable managing more roaming partners

within existing resources and OpEx

• Raises operational efficiency in the fault-resolution lifecycle, significantly reducing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR)

4 Mobile Assurance — Centralized Roaming Management System

Operation

CRMS is just one of the applications within the VIAVI acceSS7 Mobile Assurance portfolio, supporting both acceSS7 for GSM, GPRS, MSS, and UMTS service assurance and accessLTE for LTE service assurance. With applications covering real-time monitoring, historical reporting, BI (multi-dimensional) analysis, and detailed troubleshooting, the VIAVI solution portfolio is today delivering higher revenues, increased customer satisfaction levels, and lower operating costs to many mobile-service providers around the world.

The CRMS application operates on key interconnect interfaces for both 2G/3G and LTE services, where it captures and processes key inbound and outbound roaming transactions. With 24x7 real-time monitoring of all roaming transactions, CRMS is able to immediately alert service providers to any roaming service issues, no matter if they are due to problems on home or partner networks.

HPLMN

VPLMN

S11

S1-U

S1-MME

LTE Roaming Monitoring Points

IPX

S5

S6a

S6a

S9

GxS8

S8

HSS H-PCRFP-GW

MMEP-GW

V-PCRF

eNodeB S-GW

Signalingbackbone

Signalingbackbone

Home PLMN

IN

SCCP-MAP + SMS + CAMEL

SMSC

MSS/MSC

GW MSC

GGSN

SGSN

HLR

VPLMNs

GRX

Gp – GTP-C

2G/3G roaming monitoring points

LTE roaming monitoring points

Mobile Assurance — Centralized Roaming Management System 5

Analysis

The CRMS top-level user-interface screen is known as the Alarmogram. It is a highly-intelligent, multilayered structure that lets a service provider monitor a large number of measurements across hundreds of networks in a single view. Thresholds and alarms can be configured for all metrics and all networks. The interface provides a visual alarm using a RAG (red/ amber/green) status view and any networks that are experiencing performance issues provide an alarm so it becomes visible at the highest level. Roaming partners are ranked such that those with the highest severity problems over the previous 2 hours are shown at the top. This provides valuable guidance on how to prioritize fault-investigation efforts.

Roaming partners are ranked such that those with the highest severity problems over the previous 2 hours are shown at the top.

For any selected alarm, the next step is to examine the CRMS time-series histogram for the KPI that triggered the alarm. This screen shows which errors occurred during each measurement interval and why they resulted in a fault notification. The time-series histogram also indicates how many subscribers are affected by each error, key information for estimating the scope and impact of any problem.

By clicking on an error displayed on the error cause volume legend, the user can launch an in-context troubleshooting session with the acceSS7 Session Trace application to obtain a fully decoded signaling trace. Session Trace is launched with the relevant time ranges, error filters, and subscriber IMSI pre-populated. As well as viewing, the trace can be saved in a variety of formats for attaching to trouble tickets or passing to roaming partners.

6 Mobile Assurance — Centralized Roaming Management System

Reporting Platform

The CRMS solution is a simple and intuitive application. By having a fully integrated solution service, issues are identified, investigated, and resolved in a shorter space of time, thus protecting the revenue stream. However, to understand the true impact of outages to the business, it is necessary to be able to retrospectively report on these incidents. The CRMS solution has a reporting facility that lets the service provider compile reports on any of the information stored in the CRMS database. There is a report creation and publishing facility supplied with the solution, using the Business Objects Infoview platform. Reports can be published to a web portal and emailed to users, if necessary.

Reports can illustrate the impact of incidents, show the service experience through the use of key performance indicators, and provide the basis for service-improvement initiatives. The reports can help establish tighter

thresholds for the real-time environment, enable direct comparisons of performance between operators, countries, and network elements, or provide reports of the worst “n” style for any time period.

Monitored Roaming Procedures

2G/3G Voice and SMS Service Roaming Procedures

Protocol Roaming Event/Procedure Highlights Problems in:Map Update location Customer registration (2G)Map (3G) Update GPRS location Customer registration (3G)Map Provide roaming number Mobile terminated calls PRNMap Mobile-originated FSM Sending SMSs while abroadMap Mobile-terminated FSM Receiving SMSs while abroadMap Send routing info for SM Routing internation MT-SMSMap Send authentication parameters Authenticating a customer’s identityMap Cancel location Roaming coverageMap Total MAP MAP service integrity and availabilitySCCP SCCP transport SCCP transport integrity and availabilityCAMEL CAMEL initial DP CAMEL service integrity and availabilityUSSD Collective performance of MAP_PROCESS_

UNSTRUCTURED_SS_REQUEST and MAP_UNSTRUCTURED_SS_NOTIFY

USSD (pre-paid) service integrity and availability

2G/3G Data Service Roaming Procedures

Protocol Roaming Event/Procedure Highlights Problems in:Gp Create PDP context Establishing a data context to home networkGp Update PDP context Roaming issues while moving between SGSNsGp Create PDP context (APN) Establishing connections to specific data services

Mobile Assurance — Centralized Roaming Management System 7

Roaming Procedure KPI Measurements

These measurements include:

• Absence, total volume

• Success volume, success rate, success rate (excluding masked errors)

• Total error volume, total network error volume, total masked error volume, error rate, masked error rate, network error rate

• Total service response time, average service response time

Associated Solutions, Applications, and Services

The CRMS application is supported in the following solutions:

• acceSS7 for GSM, GPRS, UMTS, MSS network, and service assurance

• accessLTE for LTE network and service assurance

In addition to CRMS, the following complementary applications are supported within VIAVI Mobile Assurance solutions:

• QoS Analyzer for real-time monitoring of networks and services

• QoS Analyzer for SIGTRAN for real-time monitoring of SIGTRAN networks and associated services

• Session Trace for network and service troubleshooting

• Protocol Analysis for flexible message capture and decode

• Data Mining Toolkit (DMT) for protocol transaction-based network and service performance reporting by dimension (for example, device and location)

• accessInsight Data Feeds Export for the export of VIAVI passive-probe data to third-party applications

The following professional services are associated with VIAVI Mobile Assurance solutions and specifically the CRMS application:

• Education service — operator and administrator training courses

• Consulting service — assurance solution operational assistance

• Consulting service — assurance solution health reporting

• Support service — solution support including software update service

• Managed service — VIAVI solution ownership and/or operation

For more information on any of the above solutions, applications and professional services, please visit viavisolutions.com.

Monitored Roaming Procedures

2G/3G Voice and SMS Service Roaming Procedures

Protocol Roaming Event/Procedure Highlights Problems in:Map Update location Customer registration (2G)Map (3G) Update GPRS location Customer registration (3G)Map Provide roaming number Mobile terminated calls PRNMap Mobile-originated FSM Sending SMSs while abroadMap Mobile-terminated FSM Receiving SMSs while abroadMap Send routing info for SM Routing internation MT-SMSMap Send authentication parameters Authenticating a customer’s identityMap Cancel location Roaming coverageMap Total MAP MAP service integrity and availabilitySCCP SCCP transport SCCP transport integrity and availabilityCAMEL CAMEL initial DP CAMEL service integrity and availabilityUSSD Collective performance of MAP_PROCESS_

UNSTRUCTURED_SS_REQUEST and MAP_UNSTRUCTURED_SS_NOTIFY

USSD (pre-paid) service integrity and availability

2G/3G Data Service Roaming Procedures

Protocol Roaming Event/Procedure Highlights Problems in:Gp Create PDP context Establishing a data context to home networkGp Update PDP context Roaming issues while moving between SGSNsGp Create PDP context (APN) Establishing connections to specific data services

Monitored Roaming Procedures

LTE Data Service Roaming Procedures

LTE Roaming Configuration

Key Interfaces

Home routed traffic S6a and S8Local breakout and HPLMN services only

S6a and S9

Local breakout and VPLMN services only

S6a and S9

S6a Protocol ProcedureDiameter Update locationDiameter Cancel locationDiameter Insert subscriber dataDiameter Purge UEDiameter Authentication info retrievalS8 Protocol ProcedureGTPv2-C Create bearer (APN)GTPv2-C Create session-bearer

context creationGTPv2-C Modify bearer-bearer

context modificationGTPv2-C Update bearerGTPv2-C Delete bearerGTPv2-C Delete sessionS9 Protocol ProcedureDiameter CC request commandDiameter CC answer commandDiameter Re-authorization

request commandDiameter Re-authorization

answer command

© 2019 VIAVI Solutions, Inc. Product specifications and descriptions in this document are subject to change without notice. crms-br-nsd-tm-ae30168073 902 0314

Contact Us +1 844 GO VIAVI (+1 844 468 4284)

To reach the VIAVI office nearest you, visit viavisolutions.com/contact

viavisolutions.com