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vendors like Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, ADVA and others have followed suit by introducing standards-based, “built-in” instrumentation within their offerings to measure end-to-end quality of Carrier Ethernet. Leveraging such instrumentation is inherently advantageous in that service providers can avoid the costs of deploying explicit probes (that may be expensive as well as intrusive) across the entire Radio Access Network (RAN) backhaul. Furthermore, if the Ethernet backhaul being deployed consists of multiple vendors, some of which may not be standards-compliant or have proprietary instrumentation, operators need to be able to leverage the vendor instrumentation in a generic manner. This clearly implies the need for effective service assurance platforms that can leverage vendor-specific instrumentation to portray the end-to-end quality of the Ethernet backhaul using vendor agnostic key quality indicators.

In a Carrier Ethernet environment, over-sizing a network infrastructure to meet growing traffic demands is counterproductive because it defeats the advantage Ethernet provides in that it is a more flexible and scalable technology. Under-provisioning, on the other hand, would compromise end-to-end

transport quality and cause other problems such as sloppy synchronization in the RAN. Therefore, rightsizing the components of the Carrier Ethernet backhaul infrastructure is necessary to realize the advantages of Carrier Ethernet’s flexibility and scalability, while also ensuring end-user quality of experience.

Rightsizing is complicated, however, by the extremely temporal data traffic patterns generated by mobile consumers. For example, holidays and events have a significant influence on consumers’ messaging and browsing patterns (e.g., Times Square on New Year’s Eve). Additionally, demographic factors cause variation in data traffic spatially—there is more data traffic in New York than in Arkansas. An accurate comprehension of these fluctuating traffic patterns requires deep analytics of traffic utilization. Industry-proven concepts such as “busy day” and “busy hour” designations are crucial in determining the worst stress levels of the backhaul network. Furthermore, hourly baselines, engineering benchmarks such as 95th percentile, and accurate traffic forecasts based on historical traffic usage are indispensible to achieving the objective of

entrusted with a far more sophisticated transmission medium in Carrier Ethernet, and they need the right set of assurance tools to measure and report on performance in a holistic manner. Engineering an end-to-end connection between a cell site and the upstream controller using Carrier Ethernet requires an orchestration of all of the aforementioned entities, as a modification of any one entity requires a deep and ongoing analysis of the other entities from a performance perspective.

Carrier Ethernet is the transmission medium of choice for mobile backhaul. For all of the foregoing reasons, having the right service assurance solution is indispensable when it comes to exploiting the advantages Ethernet backhaul offers. Mobile operators should seek a solution that provides proactive performance management and reporting capabilities across a multi-vendor Carrier Ethernet environment and mobile domain. Equipped with such a solution, they can realize the business objectives behind Ethernet backhaul while ensuring the quality experience end-users demand from their mobile services.