【资料名称】：LTE Operations and Maintenance StrategyU

【资料作者】：www.motorola.com/serviceproviders

【资料日期】：2009

【资料语言】：英文

【资料格式】：PDF

【资料目录和简介】：

Long Term Evolution (LTE) provides greatly increased wireless bandwidth, enabling a number of new broadband applications such as high-quality mobile video and wireless online gaming. A key challenge for each LTE operator is to provide these new services in a high-margin, cost effective manner. To meet these cost constraints, Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) for the new LTE infrastructure and Operational Expenses (OPEX) associated with operating the LTE infrastructure must be carefully controlled. While controlling CAPEX costs remains an important issue for mobile operators, OPEX costs have become a more significant part of operators’ cost structure. Operators have made excellent fundamental operations and maintenance a hurdle to the adoption of LTE technology. This paper will examine how the operations and maintenance strategies for LTE infrastructure management must be changed in order to meet the OPEX expectations of LTE operators.
A typical OPEX breakdown is shown below:

OPEX-related costs generally become a greater portion of the overall spend as the network matures. 3G technologies have shown that network-related OPEX costs, averaged over the lifecycle of the product, are ~30% of the total costs associated with the network. This includes costs related to backhaul and network operations and maintenance. This portion of OPEX is directly influenced by the solution provided by the infrastructure vendor, and is the focus of this paper.
OPEX Drivers for LTE
Since backhaul and operations and maintenance are the key OPEX drivers influenced by infrastructure vendors, a significant driver in LTE is to reduce the cost in these areas. Current 3GPP/3GPP2 operators are striving to introduce an LTE network with little or no increase in operations and maintenance staff. This implies the following:
• LTE operations and maintenance must fit into the existing operations and maintenance workflows, allowing the same staff to manage LTE and legacy technologies.
• LTE operations and maintenance must have a greater degree of self-management. Existing 2G and 3G networks already tax the ability of operations and maintenance staffs to monitor, repair, optimize, and expand the legacy networks. If LTE equipment has the same management characteristics as 2G and 3G network infrastructures, existing operations and maintenance staff will be overwhelmed and the LTE operators will be forced to hire additional operations and maintenance personnel.
Given the consensus among vendors and operators that OPEX costs associated with infrastructure must be decreased, a significant push has been made in the LTE standards to change the operations and maintenance paradigm. The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance and 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) have standardized a set of capabilities known as Self-Organizing Networks (SON). SON will revolutionize the level of automation in operations and maintenance and significantly decrease the OPEX associated with operations
and maintenance.