OysterCatcher™

Advanced solution for femtocell Access Point analysis and diagnostics

Using OysterCatcher, the behaviour patterns of live femtocell Access Points (APs) in a large-scale deployment can be analysed to resolve issues, enhance real-world performance, provide better customer service and support, and deliver continuous improvement in KPIs.

 

Capturing mass deployment issues

As the number of deployed femtocells in the marketplace continues to grow exponentially, so the variety of locations and radio environments being served is also growing. Gaining a better understanding of the real world behaviour of live femtocells in the field is vital for operators seeking to maximise performance – and therefore return on investment – from femtocell deployments.

KPIs such as call drop rates and voice quality are generally monitored across the deployed base of femtocell APs in the network (this is part of standard Performance Management provided by the femto network management systems). It’s very important that these KPIs meet customer expectations, otherwise complaints and returns can quickly degrade the femtocell business case.

When the installed base reaches hundreds of thousands of APs, finding problem areas and diagnosing their causes is rather like finding a needle in a haystack. The aggregated KPI stats might show that something is affecting performance of the femto network, but finding the individual APs affected, let alone diagnosing the cause of the problem, is very challenging.

 

The OysterCatcher solution

This is where OysterCatcher comes in. It’s no good having Performance Management stats if you can’t do anything with them. OysterCatcher provides the tools needed for drill-down diagnostics and root cause analysis, enabling continuous improvement of femto KPIs based on live network data.

The OysterCatcher solution consists of probe software in the AP and server-side diagnostic tools. The probe software intelligently captures and uploads relevant diagnostic data from individual APs to a server-side database, where OysterCatcher provides tools for diagnosing performance issues.

 

Improved real world performance

OysterCatcher not only allows field issues to be diagnosed and fixed rapidly, but also provides key information that can be used to enhance the Radio Resource Management algorithms used by the AP to optimise its radio performance. In other words, OysterCatcher provides exactly the real-world data needed by ip.access developers to fine-tune radio algorithms, and deliver improvements as software upgrades to existing APs in the field.

This real-world learning is used to enable femtocells to respond automatically when they encounter difficult radio environments in the future, facilitating the development of true Self Organising and adaptive networks of femtocells.