A customer service assurance platform for mobile broadband networks

In this article, we discuss trends, issues, requirements and solutions for customer service assurance (CSA) platforms for mobile broadband networks. We propose a distributed probe-based architecture called intelligent CSA (iCSA), and demonstrate how it is a key component of an advanced OSS. iCSA provides support to OSSs, addressing a number of important issues: increased bit rate, joint analysis of control and user plane, multidimensional analysis, root cause analysis, and so forth. To provide real evidence of the benefits of our proposals on a real mobile broadband network, we also illustrate experimental results on two hot topics: mobility and session management and root cause analysis of TCP connections.