communication services in the cloud: challenges and solutions

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Communication Services in the Cloud: Challenges and Solutions Oracle Communications Session Monitor

Hendrik Scholz Product Manager, Strategy Communications Global Business Unit October 2014


Safe Harbor Statement

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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Program Agenda

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Rationale

Challenges & Solutions

Oracle Communications Operations Monitor

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Rationale

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Why we care: Churn reduction

• Customer acquisition vs. keeping customers

– $400* per customer marketing cost for new customer

– $100* to keep customer happy

– 40-60%* of customers can choose new contract per year

• Sample scenario

– 1,000,000 customers

– Customers that may churn away: 400,000-600,000

– 1% reduction in churn rate: 4,000 to 6,000 customers *$300 = $12-18MM marketing budget savings

*) numbers from European Tier-1 Mobile operator

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Challenges & Solutions

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Quality of Service Service Level Agreements

Verification and Enforcement

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New technologies Virtualization, NFV, Cloud

Troubleshooting

Topics


Challenge: Quality of Service Monitoring and monetizing Quality of Service

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Quality of Service: Issue or service differentiator?

Signaling Metrics

• Service Availability

• Call completion

• Customer reachability

– Registration history

Media Metrics

• Voice quality

• One-way audio detection

• Transient quality issues

• Reliable/comparable results

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How to obtain (voice) quality information?


Voice Monitoring Technologies

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Oracle

SBC

Oracle SBC

Oracle SBC

Oracle SBC

RTCP Reports

Oracle

SBC

Oracle SBC

Oracle SBC

Oracle SBC

Active testing

Test server

Test

server

Oracle

SBC

Oracle SBC

Oracle SBC

Oracle SBC

Passive mid-point monitoring


Overview: Voice Monitoring technologies

+ Full reference model

+ End-to-end delay

- Does not scale

- No customer calls

+ Monitors actual calls

- Does not see beyond network edge

- No end-to-end delay

+ End-to-end solution

+ End-to-end delay

- No network segmentation

- Lack of trust

- Little market penetration

- Average values

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Active testing Passive mid-point

monitoring RTCP reports


Voice Monitoring Solution: Hybrid System

• Use mid-point monitoring to trustworthy real-time data

– SLA Verification and Enforcement

• Leverage RTCP for troubleshooting

• Use active testing for troubleshooting

– E.g. SIP Media-Loopback (RFC 6849)

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Voice Monitoring Granularity One average value vs. time slices

• Voice problems are transient

• May differ per direction

• Alert on KPIs independent of individual calls – ‘quality of all calls on trunk X at time Y’

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Challenge: New technologies Virtualization, NFV, Cloud

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Virtualization, Cloud, NFV

• Use of KPIs for Orchestration

• Threats due to new technologies –Network components will be decomposed • Probes and data warehouse in individual boxes/VMs

– Geographical separation

–Open internet

– Restrictive firewalls

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Requirements due to new technologies

• Secured/Encrypted network connections (TLS)

• Key management – Prevent data from being sent to wrong destination

• Compression, reduced number of connections

– Remote systems need to connect to cloud

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Challenge: Troubleshooting

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Troubleshooting

• Specialized tools required

– Domain-knowledge, not general IP transport tool

– Correlation of different call legs and protocols

– End-to-end view with localization of issues

• Real-time + Historical data

• Signaling/media recording – To prove issues to third parties

–Needs to comply with local regulations

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Troubleshooting

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Oracle Communications Operations Monitor OCOM aka ‘Palladion’

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Oracle Communications Session Monitor product family

• Oracle Communications Operations Monitor (OCOM)

– Service Provider focused Operations Monitor

• Oracle Enterprise Operations Monitor (OEOM)

– Enterprise version of OCOM. Optimized pricing and features for Enterprises

• Oracle Communications Fraud Monitor (OCFM) – Fraud Detection for Enterprise Environments

• Oracle Communications Control Plane Monitor (OCCPM)

– Diameter monitoring for IMS/LTE environments

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Session Monitor Deployment Scenario For Service Providers

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OCOM Agents (network probes) Data retrieval Preprocessing Media analysis

IMS Core

GMSC

P-CSCF I-CSCF

STP

SGW MGC

S-CSCF S-CSCF

HSS

Next Generation Network

Residential users Business users

SBC

SS7 GW

SBC

DSC

Mediation Engine Historical data Traffic analysis System management Real-time processing Correlation Mediation Engine

Control Plane Monitor

Fraud Monitor Communications

Operations Monitor

SBC

VoIP Carriers

SIP Peering

SS7

PSTN Cloud

VoIP Carriers S6 Diameter

Transaction

Oracle embedded Agents Data retrieval QoS reporting Event reporting


Branch office

Oracle

SBC

Mediation Engine

Control Plane Monitor

Fraud Monitor Communications

Operations Monitor

Deployment Architecture

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Branch office

Oracle

SBC

MPLS / Cloud / Internet Oracle

SBC

Lync Server

Oracle

SBC

IVR ACD

Avaya

CM/SM

Cisco

CUCM

Oracle SBC

Standalone probe

Embedded probe


OCOM Solution September 2014 Release

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OCOM 3.3.70.0.0 New features

Quality of Service

• Multi-tenant capable KPIs

• ITU-T e-model MOS values –Mid-point monitoring

–Network segmentation

– RTCP as additional data source

• DTMF tone processing

Service Level Agreements

• Per realm, device, trunk, …

• Verification + enforcement – SNMP alarming

• Data export to 3rd parties

• Enrichment of billing CDRs with voice quality

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DTMF Reports Telephone-events

• Processing of DTMF tones in telephone-event packets

• Display of DTMF information

• Permissions model to restrict visibility of DTMF tones

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Requires standalone probe


OCOM 3.3.70.0.0 New features

Virtualization, NFV, Cloud

• Virtualization support in OCSM products

• Encrypted + authenticated links between probes and ME

• KPIs for NFV orchestration – E.g. device delay

Troubleshooting

• Real-time end-to-end correlated troubleshooting

• PCAP + PDF generation

• Alarming

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VoIP/VoLTE/Diameter Analytics Big Data

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Domain-specific Data Source and Knowledge

• Real-time session information

• End-to-end correlated xDRs

• Details you won’t find in traditional CDRs, e.g. voice quality

• Big Data Interfaces

–Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA): Hadoop

–Oracle Communications Data Model (OCDM): Data warehouse data scheme

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Customer Experience Management

Network Optimization

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Policy Analytics Fraud Management,

Revenue Assurance

Analytics Applications


Correlated data Voice Quality, geo-location

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Customer Experience Management

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• On-demand OCDM queries from Palladion


Customer Experience Enhancements

• Identification of device-specific issues

• Pro-active fixes, e.g. firmware updates pushed through network

• Educate contact center about known issues; reducing per case time

• Upsell strategy benefiting both customer and CSP

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SR)

in %

iPhone 5

Samsung Galaxy S2

Nokia 3320

iPhone 5 ASR declined, e.g. due to broken firmware, leading to less revenue per device per day. The graph also allows to track the time to fix (device-specific back to normal).


Revenue Generation: Handset Capabilities

• Drive targeted marketing with analytics insights – Identification of missed revenue

opportunities

– Target customer with low ARPU • e.g. upsell to new handset/contract

• Confirm success via analytics

– Adjust campaign if needed

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min

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Nokia 3320

iPhone 5

iPhone 5S

Samsung Galaxy II

Graph shows daily usage per handset type. Enticing customers of underperforming handsets to upgrade increases ARPU.

Missed revenue opportunity


Service Level Agreements: Sample Data

Signaling Performance Voice Quality

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ASR

NER

NER SLA

SLA violation

SLA defines 99% service availability based on Network Efficiency Ratio (RFC 6076). SLA is violated on 1/13 even though ASR is still in an acceptable range, e.g. due to customers trying to setup calls multiple times.

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max MOS

avg MOS

min MOS

lower MOS limit

A lower MOS (voice quality) limit may be defined. Short breaches of this lower limit may be acceptable and can be utilized as early warnings (e.g. on 1/12 or 1/20).

SLA violation


Safe Harbor Statement

The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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communication services in the cloud: challenges and solutions

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