Cisco Cisco Prime for Mobility 0.5 White Paper

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White Paper

Cisco Prime for Mobility: Advanced Management
for the Next-Generation Mobile Internet

What You Will Learn

Today’s mobile network is nearly unrecognizable compared with that of a decade ago. Huge increases in traffic

volumes and subscribers, diverse devices, and rich media applications are all bringing significant revenues to

mobile operators. But this growth has been accompanied by high costs and rising complexity associated with

managing the mobile Internet. Currently disparate legacy and newer network management tools from different

vendors handle various network segments. These point products are noncollaborative, are limited in their scale of

operations, and are often unable to consistently support quality of service (QoS) levels demanded by customers.

This white paper provides an overview of the management challenges facing mobile operators using current

management solutions. It then presents the features and benefits of Cisco Prime

™

for Mobility, a suite of

management applications that directly addresses those challenges. Cisco Prime for Mobility is a highly scalable

and cost-effective end-to-end management suite that spans the entire mobile network topology - from the cell

tower to the radio access network (RAN) backhaul to a terabit Evolved Packet Core (EPC) on the Cisco

ASR

5000. It is an advanced management solution that provides a holistic view of the mobile network, dependable

service assurance, simplified administration, and faster service provisioning for devices and technologies. Service

providers can benefit from rapid time to market for new service offerings.

Challenge: Managing Mobile Networks Has Become Complex, Costly, and Inefficient

Mobile operators are struggling to keep up with growing traffic volumes, to handle the corresponding complexity

within core and transport networks, to provide workarounds due to limits on RAN densification and spectrum

scarcity, and to support a myriad of different devices and ever-evolving and demanding applications. Growth and

change are everywhere. Mobile data traffic is forecast to increase 18-fold between 2011 and 2016 to 10.8

exabytes per month by 2016, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast

Update, 2011-2016. The number of mobile devices in use by 2016 will be triple the world’s population. These

sophisticated devices will require high-bandwidth, low-latency connections for rich media applications. Outages

and poor service are unacceptable. Customers expect swift and sure provisioning and fast troubleshooting to

address any issues that arise.

Back-end systems to manage provisioning must also evolve to meet changing demands. Complex systems must

be simpler to use; scalable across enterprise, consumer, and converged fixed and mobile networks; and provide

faster time to market. This is an area where mobile networks currently are faltering. Legacy management tools in

core and transport networks have proliferated over time in answer to specific needs and due to the integration of

technologies through acquisitions. These point products in separate siloes do not collaborate with each other. The

result is lower efficiency and growing operational costs as network administrators grapple with very challenging,

complex, and nonstandard management environments.