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For many years Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) have been using Drive Testing (DT) as one of the key methods for measuring and assessing the coverage, capacity and Quality of Service (QoS) of mobile radio networks. DTs are used to collect data relating to the services running on the mobile radio network such as voice or data services, radio frequency scanner information and GPS information to provide location logging. Thereafter, the data set collected is used for mobile network performance assessment and improvement.

How is mobile network performance assessed and improved with collected data?

Good estimation of network performance requires a huge amount of data to be collected and analysed. Engaging with our customers over the past number of years, they’ve confirmed that enormous time is spent for both Drive Testing and the analysis of the logs.

Typically, there is a lot of manual effort involved in the collection, parsing and analysis of those logs, the need to understand what has caused an abnormal scenario such as a locked/dropped call, long call setup time, poor speech quality, low throughput etc.

In some cases, an end-to-end (RAN and Core) view of the call is required to understand which part of the network the issue occurred. In order to achieve this typically requires an engineer looking at one set of logs in DT tool, another set in a Core Network probe and trying to align them in time manually, which is time consuming.

Engineering expertise is then needed to analyse the logs, find patterns and decide on the root-cause of the issue and suggest some remedy actions. Considering all this, the lack of automated insights on DT and probe analysis is quite obvious.

How to reduce the time needed for network performance assessment and improvement?

Aspire has developed state of the art automation process, supported by the tool that correlates DT logs with data collected from probes on different interfaces.

Our solution aims to:

• Automate as much as possible manual analysis done by engineers
• Increase the speed of detection and diagnosis of issues
• Bring new insights by analyzing large volumes of calls collectively

What our automated solution is capable of?

Our Drive Test & Probe Analytics tool has the following benefits:

• Automatic collection, parsing, correlation, analysis and presentation of DT and probe logs
• Full end-to-end visibility per call, including map view and parallel view of MO and MT call side
• Flexibility to define new events and scenarios to be automatically identified
• Automated RCA and issue categorization
• Holistic network investigation and automatic identification of patterns and systematic issues

How does our automated solution work in practice?

Aspire has supported a multi-country and multi-vendor European operator to achieve its goal to be the best performing in the country. With this automated solution we’ve managed to improve accessibility and retainability as traditionally important metrics, but also a staggering improvement in VoLTE call setup time reduction by 40%, ranking our customer at number one in this test category.

For the first time our customer won the mobile benchmark and Aspire’s innovative solution became part of their daily routine allowing engineers to focus on other high value activities.

If you have any questions about this blog or would like any further information, please contact me on djordje.tesic@www.aspiretechnology.com.