Some network health and status information that is more important that other information when it comes to RAN operations. That critical information is vital to properly handling network outages or upgrades. So does it deserve special treatment to ensure it is accurate, timely and is a fit basis for making decision making?

You probably have at least one system that indicates cell status, has it proven 100% accurate and available when you needed it? If not, why not? The system probably fits into a modern multi-layered enterprise architecture. There is a long chain of components that your critical information has to pass through, message queues, databases, and middleware of all kinds, as well as third party applications. Every single link in the chain is a potential source of error, delay or failure. Quality assurance is increasingly difficult to maintain with constant software changes and updates in the chain of components. Complete end-to-end regression testing is impractical. And confidence in a specific data item is very hard to maintain in such complex systems environment.

Your key RAN status information on display relies ultimately on tens or hundreds of queries or notification to update. Very few Operators are clear on what pathway that critical information follows to get to the display in front of you. All too often it is out of date or in some way erroneous.

In the past it was too computationally intensive to directly access all RAN devices and determine key information like Cell-status across the network. With the advent of commodity CPUs and memory this has all changed and such an approach is now feasible.  There is a limited but key role for this approach in relation to certain critical information items. In fact it's the only approach that can gives manager the confidence they need in the critical data they see.  This is exactly the approach taken in other mission-critical operating environments such as those in the aerospace and nuclear industries.

RANmetrics uses an innovative parallel processing engine to directly access thousands of devices and report with certainty their key status information. This is fully scalable across any RAN for small sets of data and is a perfect solution to ensure operations directors and manager have critical information in front of them that they can rely on. This is only method that decision makes can reply on to be accurate. The only upgrades that need to be factored in are the devices themselves.