CENX teams with Spirent

With CENX’s Cortx Service Orchestrator, service providers have a single pane of glass for visualization of their service topology, network utilization and performance metrics, so they can assure a high quality of service. Spirent Landslide™ enables end-to-end testing of the mobile network, including sophisticated voice Perceptual Objective Listening Quality Assessment (POLQA) measurements.

VoLTE deployments are still in their infancy, with only 14 operators in 7 countries worldwide having launched commercial service. Service providers are also leveraging Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology to build out their VoLTE infrastructure most cost-effectively. It is critical that operators have the tools to manage service performance across both physical and virtual network elements, so that early adopter consumers enjoy an exceptional quality of experience.

“This demonstration proves that, with the right tools in hand, management of complex network transformations doesn’t itself have to be complex,” said Chris Purdy, CTO of CENX. “Cortx Service Orchestrator is able to provide a unified view of the mobile network from an end-to-end VoLTE services perspective, across both physical and virtual elements. This is a landmark first in the industry.”

“The virtualization of mobile network functions provides flexibility and agility, but without predictability and visibility networks can quickly become very chaotic and impact the user experience,” stated Ross Cassan, Director of Marketing – Mobile Infrastructure of Spirent. “Spirent Landslide™ enables the constant validation of the impact that changes in user behavior have on the network, and that changes in the network have on the user experience. The demonstration provides a best-practice example of the predictability and visibility toolset needed to trust key services like VoLTE to virtual elements.”

Key features of this ground-breaking proof of concept include:

• Spirent Landslide™ provides the comprehensive Mobile Packet Core (MPC) network test environment, emulating real-world control and data traffic load through a virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), and calculating response times, throughput and real-time POLQA voice quality measurements.

• Cortx Service Orchestrator ingests these metrics, and performs big data correlation and analytics. Using intuitive search capabilities, operations personnel can quickly access the relevant data, analyze the voice quality performance in the context of the service topology, and drill down into details as needed.
• In the event of degraded performance due to severe VoLTE traffic load, the user is able to sectionalize the issues between the physical and virtual domains, and take corrective action which could involve dynamically scaling the vEPC functions.