In today’s world, mobile network engineers face many challenges that must be overcome in order to streamline the precision and efficiency of engineering process. Many of these challenges are associated with unprecedented design dynamics that engineers must deal with on a day to day basis.

One of the principal dynamics is hyper-competition, which stimulates strong service, device and tariff differentiation by competing Mobile Operators. This increases the dynamics associated with service demand and affects churn, making it more difficult for engineers to accurately plan the capacity and configuration of the network.

Another significant dynamic is the rate of change of technology, which results in multiple overlays being added to the network, making it a lot more complex and difficult to engineer. One of the major issues associated with this is understanding the interplay between 2G and 3G technologies, which can significantly erode the capacity and performance of many core system elements. This underlying technology is also shifting from circuit switched to IP where demand is far less predictable, which only adds to the challenges facing network engineers. 

The rate of change of technology also means that network assets have a shorter and shorter lifecycle, meaning there is less time in which to get a return before improved technology comes along. Newer technologies will typically deliver more functionality &/or capacity at lower cost, so it is important for network engineers to keep network designs as lean as possible, while simultaneously delivering the best possible performance.

All of these factors contribute to the need for smarter network engineering tools, with the ability to address all of the above design dynamics simultaneously. To achieve this, the team at Cerion has developed a suite of tools with extremely powerful “what if” capabilities and the ability to concurrently optimize network design from both a capacity and performance perspective.

These tools provide network engineers with an automated capability to assess the viability and impacts of different design scenarios in real time. By wrapping flexible “what-if” analysis with optimization algorithms, the user is able to derive an optimal design for any given design scenario. In this way, despite the tremendous dynamics that network engineers must deal with, the time taken to arrive at a fully optimized solution is reduced from weeks to days.