Virtually all of the service paths between a NodeB and RNC, including the CSR and aggregation CESR, included misconfigured parameters.  Analyzing the roughly 155,000 SCTP parameters, reveals that 4 percent (roughly 6200) were misconfigured. Approximately 40 percent of Iubs from a single RNC included at least one misconfigured SCTP setting, potentially causing intermittent performance degradations in 30 of the 75 NodeBs served by that RNC, or roughly 120,000 subscribers. Assuming a number of NodeBs are serving high value regions, such as business districts, government locations, and affluent regions, network performance degradations may result in higher customer churn and associated loss revenues. Network wide, this equates to 16.2 million subscribers, or 41 percent of total, potentially impacted customers by SCTP misconfigurations.

Backhaul network misconfigurations are equally probable and problematic. For instance, misconfiguration of QoS settings are commonplace. As latency-sensitive, real-time interactive mobile applications increase, QoS misconfigurations in the backhaul factor heavily into poor application performance and customer experience. Part of the mobile operator’s equipment-commissioning process is to disable Telnet and other settings to reduce the potential for unauthorized network access. Interestingly, 95 percent of the CSRs deployed exhibited incorrect security parameters, namely involving Telnet being enabled. Given increasing public awareness to cyber security risks and breaches, weak security policies also affect consumer perception and increases churn risk.

Measurable Business Benefits

Automated analysis of configuration and service parameter anomalies can dramatically improve resolution of incidents and visibility into network deployment. Data-driven analytics helps prioritize remediation, allowing operators to focus resources and attention appropriately. This insight enables operators to predict and proactively refine network configurations (such as SCTP settings) to drive maximum network stability and performance. By reducing customer churn rates by reducing service quality issues caused by network misconfigurations, mobile operators can preserve over hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues. 

As misconfigurations are the root cause for a significant percentage of service degradations or outages, a key first step in the troubleshooting process is to collect network configuration data. Multiple network devices, both physical network elements such as eNodeBs and cell site routers as well as virtual network functions like virtual evolved packet cores are part of the service delivery network. Typically, service delivery networks span multiple technologies and vendors, As such, specialized Tier 2 or 3 vendor and technology support engineers are required to access, collect and analyze configuration data.  Industry benchmarks of the average cost per trouble ticket, vary greatly with Tier 1 support being most cost-effective with vendor support being the highest. Needless to say, the time and cost associated with network configuration analysis is significant. Automated service-oriented network configuration auditing has the potential to significantly accelerate trouble ticket resolution rates, minimize troubleshooting time and reduce costs.

The need for network data integrity auditing and analytics only increases in importance with the continued evolution towards software-defined, virtualized radio and mobile backhaul networks. Technologies such as Cloud RAN, for instance, have the potential to improve mobile network efficiency and performance, but creates greater likelihood for performance impacting configuration mismatches and an expanded attack surface for security vulnerabilities. Network data integrity auditing can help detect misconfigurations of ingress/egress parameters (such as virtual switch port settings, VLAN mappings, and traffic management policies) which could compromise performance. Similarly, proactive network configuration data auditing  and associated analytics can be used to immediately detect security policy violations or alert to potential denial of service attacks (for example detect rogue virtual machines, virtual taps, or detect resource allocation changes which may compromise performance and lead to service degradation.

Use Network Data to Chart Your Course Correctly

Mobile service provides must improve operational efficiency, increase network performance, maintain secure networks, and enable new services. By proactively auditing network configuration data at the time of new network commissioning and as part of a continuous operations best practice, operators can proactively identify misconfigurations and obtain data integrity analytics to optimized and network performance. This helps ensure networks are ready for VoLTE, video, and other new services.