Case Study: Performance Engineering

Mobile handsets are now able to deliver a set of more diverse and valuable services than traditional voice and text, such as web browsing, video calls and interactive gaming. In order to stay competitive in a rapidly changing market, network providers are now offering a variety of novel applications that require careful and rigorous network design to provide the required levels of service.

The statistics of traffic in these new applications differ significantly from those in pure voice traffic. Existing approaches for dimensioning networks often make assumptions that lead to underestimating the capacity required and therefore compromise quality of service (QoS). Moreover, there is an increasing demand for networks that can simultaneously handle a mix of traffic types, which often each have their own QoS requirement. The performance of these networks will also have to satisfy emerging IEEE standards, such as IEEE 802.16. A common approach used to evaluate network performance is to run custom simulations. However, simulation run times can be prohibitively large and very CPU intensive.

The use of mathematics in performance engineering can dramatically boost the speed and effectiveness of mobile network design. The Smith Institute has expertise and practical experience in alternative modelling techniques that cut down dramatically the simulation time and allows the simulations to be run on a standard PC. We offer telecoms companies our expertise to help them engineer the performance of their networks to meet quality of service requirements.

To discuss your requirements in performance engineering please contact Dr Vera Hazelwood.