Managing The Wireless Infrastructure

Managing the Wireless Infrastructure: Moving Towards Autonomy Dr. Vincent J. Kovarik Jr. Vice President and Chief Technical Officer Exigent International providing communications, interfaces to Internet backbones, and Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTNs). Heretofore, the computational power within these stations has been focused on the receipt and forwarding of data packets. There was little or no computation dedicated to processing the content of the packets received.

Introduction As the wireless landscape continues to evolve, there is one certainty that can be assumed. That certainty is that the bandwidth, complexity, and content of the services provided via 3G wireless and its successors will continue to increase exponentially. Early glimpses of what these voice and data services may encompass are already beginning to emerge. Personal Cellular Service (PCS), wireless Web, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), and wireless Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are all examples of this new horizon of connectivity, information access, and portable computing.

With the additional services and capabilities being offered coupled with the increase in bandwidth, complexity, and data, it is becoming necessary to provide computational resources within the base station and related client nodes. No longer is the base station simply a transceiver which receives and forwards packets. It must perform more connection management functions than simply providing the connectionoriented capability required for cellular communications.

However, in spite of all the excitement over these new devices and services, the basic fact remains that they represent the initial vanguard of what is destined to become one of the most socio-economic transforming events of the new millennium. Just as the computer and the Internet transformed the latter half of the previous century, these new wireless services will build on previous breakthroughs and be the catalyst for a metamorphism even greater than those gone before.

Additional complexities are surfacing because, as the infrastructure becomes more diverse and more complex, it must also evolve to become more autonomous and self-sufficient. It is this area that new strides must be taken if the infrastructure is to meet the challenge of the future. Early in the history of telecommunications, all calls were placed over wire through a central station. In this central station was a human operator that physically placed the call. As the popularity of the telephone grew, the subscriber base was soon reaching proportions that were beginning to stretch the model of the

Increasing Complexity Underlying this revolution in information accessibility is increasingly complex and intelligent base stations. These hubs of high-powered computing provide the digital backbone for 1

operator that new hardware has been identified and ask for configuration information.

central office with the human operator. Some individuals in the industry feared the whole of the telephone system would collapse under the sheer volume of the traffic and the inability of the human operators to keep up with the demand.

Beyond Plug-and-Play There are several limiting factors associated with this approach for application in the 3G infrastructure. The first is that it is essentially a power-up process. With the exception of PCMCIA cards and RAID disks, it is not generally possible to insert or remove hardware components within a system while it is running. Software upgrades are problematic as well and must be addressed in a more intelligent environment to allow for seamless upgrades in functionality.

A reprieve was granted, however, in the form of the automated switch that could place calls without the intervention of a human operator. This not only saved the telephone system but enabled it to grow to proportions and service levels that were not even imagined at the time. Just as a new paradigm and technology saved the early phone system, new technologies and ideas will need to be applied to the wireless infrastructure to enable it to grow in capabilities, speed, and services.

We need to move beyond the view of a wireless station as a packet switch that provides a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) view of itself. It must become an active participant of the network. It must be aware of its health and status and able to perform dynamic (re)configuration and recovery from anomalous conditions. This concept implies an intelligence directly in the node that was previously not foreseen.

Extensibility A key facet of the evolution of network node operation is the ability to extend the capabilities of the system and replace defective or obsolete components without requiring the system to be shut down. Core 3G services must continue to be provided even when upgrades or replacements of core components are performed. While the notion of plug-and-play hardware has been proposed and, to a certain extent, realized over the past several years in specific applications, it is largely a power-up configuration process. That is, on power-up, the system is scanned for devices and the devices that respond to the probe are compared against the last known configuration. If new devices are present, the system will automatically configure itself to work with the new device. In a more basic plug-and-play environment, the system will notify an

Autonomous Nodes As we move through 3G, towards Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UTMS), integration with the Internet, and beyond, network components must achieve a level of autonomy and self-management that is an order of magnitude beyond the current state-of-the-practice. Both hardware and software components within base stations and other network nodes must manage themselves at a level well beyond today’s default approach of Simple Network Management Protocol 2

components notify the resource manager of their presence and status. As requests for services are received, the resource management system must ensure there are adequate resources and assign these resources appropriately.

(SNMP) and other similar approaches. While SNMP works well for basic overall network element management, it does not provide the level of real-time management of resources, configuration, and failure recovery needed for the 3G base stations and other complex network components. Consequently, many equipment manufacturers and software providers for these components frequently resort to developing internal or proprietary resource management software. This software provides the “first line of defense” against node failure. It monitors the internals of the node, identifies violations of pre-defined limits, and takes appropriate action when those limits are exceeded.

While there certainly is a level of resource management present in existing systems, these are typically focused on simple management of modems, frequency allocation, and similarly focused resource items. The level of resource management that is being proposed herein refers to a total resource management of the system, including hardware and software. This level of integrated resource management will, of course, require new levels of interaction between the components of a system and the core manager. These are likely to evolve over the next few years but we can already see trends towards this paradigm such as the Software Defined Radio (SDR) Forum and the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS). Both of these initiatives are focused on the development of dynamic configuration and management of complex resources including software components, hardware components, digital wave processing, wave chains, and other features.

Nodes must become intelligent and self-healing in order to achieve the promise of the 3G networking revolution. Resource Management Resource Management is a key underpinning of autonomous system operation. In order to build an intelligent system capable of healing itself, it must be capable of basic introspective knowledge. That is, it must be capable of monitoring and interpreting information concerning the state of its hardware, software, and how they are functioning in concert. This is analogous to our body’s nervous system and brain. The nervous system provides a constant input of information regarding the state of the body’s bio-mechanical operation. This information is forwarded to the brain where it is interpreted and, if necessary, acted upon.

Conclusions While the external view of a wireless station may not change significantly, the processing power and intelligence within the system will. Just as our external view and interface to the automobile has not changed significantly since it’s inception, the current-day automobile now has more processing power and intelligence than mainframe data centers had a couple of decades ago.

Resource management within the 3G nodes provides this nervous system and the intelligence to act upon the information. Applications and hardware

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Similarly, networking used to consist of simple collections of machines connected via a physical wire with a gateway providing connections to external systems. Again, while the basic model has not changed, the diversity and power of routers, bridges, gateways, and other specialized network hardware and software has increased beyond our original expectations. A familiar adage is that history repeats itself. History will be repeating itself again in the wireless industry. It will be following the pattern of increases in throughput and underlying computing power. However, new capabilities must be provided to harness and focus these advances. New tools and technologies must be developed and integrated as part of the underlying infrastructure if the promise of 3G and beyond is to become a reality. We need to be open and innovative if we are to meet and respond to these challenges and opportunities.

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