Pre5G Creates the Ultimate Customer Experience

As mobile broadband (MBB) develops rapidly, operators and end users are attaching more and more importance to quality service experience. ZTE has rolled out its Pre5G ultimate customer experience solution that focuses on improvement in voice and video quality and guarantees excellent user experience. 

eVoLTE MOS4.0+ Solution

ZTE’s eVoLTE MOS4.0+ solution allows users to enjoy perfect voice and video call experience anytime and anywhere, helping operators boost their band image and customer loyalty. This in turn helps operators attract more customers and gain more profits. The eVoLTE MOS4.0+ solution includes the following four aspects:

● 50%+ coverage increase to improve the voice coverage bottleneck in the uplink: In coverage-limited cases, the MOS4.0+ solution uses robust header compression (RoHC), enhanced TTI binding (TTIB), voice CoMP, and ECN-A to increase the voice coverage radius by 50%. This greatly reduces dropped-voice-call rate, enabling users to enjoy HD voice services anytime, anywhere.

● MOS > 4.0 to enjoy perfect user experience: The eVoLTE MOS4.0+ solution supports brand-new enhanced voice services (EVS) technology and covers the 50–16000 Hz audio spectrum, including all low frequencies, medium frequencies, and most high frequencies at which humans can hear. This dramatically improves the definition and hearing comfort of HD audios, perfectly restores the original sound, and provides UHD audio and video conversation experience for high-end users. Moreover, the solution uses various technologies for quality improvement, including active authorized scheduling and NI-based frequency-selective scheduling, to increase the mean opinion score (MOS) to above 4.0. This boosts operators’ competitiveness as well as customer satisfaction and loyalty.

● Double voice user base to handle big events with ease: The eVoLTE MOS4.0+ solution uses a series of capacity enhancement functions, including semi-persistent scheduling (SPS), RoHC, industry-leading active delay scheduling, flexible VoLTE service admission, load balancing, and congestion control to save scheduling resources and opportunities. It enables 60−100 subscribers to call per unit time per cell, bringing additional revenue of about $60. It also provides stable data rates for subscribers and helps operators increase profits and reduce TCO. Even in high-capacity scenarios such as vocal concerts, sports events, and large gatherings, the solution can provide excellent voice and data service experience.

● End-to-end MOS evaluation analysis and optimization tools to reduce Opex: As VoLTE involves various types of network elements (NEs), operators have always suffered from difficulties in voice quality quantization, fault locating, and failback in the radio network, core network, and IMS. This may cause a huge waste in Opex. ZTE provides end-to-end MOS evaluation analysis and optimization tools to enable network-wide drive tests without using expensive MOS boxes and manpower. These tools not only provide quantitatively evaluated MOS values at any time but also can be automatically associated with measurement reports to perform statistical analysis of the MOS values. They can also automatically locate faults and resolve voice problems, for example, detect, locate, and restore unidirectional calls, helping operators greatly reduce their Opex.

To date, ZTE has successfully put the eVoLTE service into commercial use for operators including China Mobile, Digi in Malaysia, PT Smartfren Telecom, and SWAN of Slovakia. Moreover, ZTE is now running pre-commercial trials of eVoLTE with high-end operators, helping them speed up the VoLTE commercialization, enhance their competitiveness, and increase customer loyalty.

Big Video Solution

But along with the rapid growth of data traffic in mobile networks, charges for data services decrease. Only when the pace of data growth is faster than that of decline in data tariffs can there be a healthy total revenue growth. The global traffic analysis indicates that in recent years most new traffic comes from video services. Videos especially HD videos greatly stimulate data services, driving rapid growth of user data consumption.

An indicator system that can quantify user experience is needed to ensure that the network construction can satisfy user video experience. The KPI-KQI-QoE architecture model is now widely used in the industry. Because of video complexity, there has not yet been a standard video experience indicator system that can be generally applied in the industry.

Drawing on years of R&D experience in the video field, ZTE has put forward a set of video quality of experience (v-QoE) indicator systems and algorithms. Video experience needs to be evaluated by many factors, which fall into the following three categories:

● Sustainable play capability: focusing on whether video play is stable, smooth or not, and whether there are blurry, freezing screens or not.

●   Interaction response experience: focusing on whether live channel switching is quick or not, and whether VOD cache time is short or not.

●   Content quality: focusing on video resolution, the number of coded frames, and video size.

vMAX—ZTE’s self-developed big data network analysis tool—can provide V-QoE quantification scores. It can also perform further analysis to determine whether network problems are in the RAN, EPC, transmission, or UEs. vMAX offers more targeted solutions to the network problems.

To ensure video experience, performance at the radio network side also needs to be improved in four aspects, including coverage, interference, capacity, and function.

Coverage Optimization

Video experience is directly related to coverage. The coverage has direct impact on the quality of video services.

Good radio coverage guarantees basic video experience. It is the premise to ensure the quality of mobile communication networks and also has a direction connection with the quality of video services. In radio network optimization, the first step is to optimize coverage, which is also a critical step especially for LTE networks. As most LTE networks adopt co-channel networking mode that results in serious co-channel interference, the coverage and interference issues significantly influence network performance.

As 4G indoor distributed sites fail to provide good coverage for video services, it is necessary to give priority to indoor small cell deployment in heavy-traffic scenarios.

Interference Optimization

Interference directly affects the quality of video services. It can be resolved by: 

● PCI planning and optimization to avoid PCI conflict

● adjusting engineering parameters

● increasing the signal strength in the serving cells and reducing the interference signal strength

● searching for external interference sources.

Capacity Increase

Network load and the number of online users can also affect video quality. Video experience of mobile networks can be improved by monitoring PRB resource utilization and the number of valid RRC users and by balancing the network load.

New Function Deployment

New functions at the radio network side including TCP optimization and DNS cache can enhance video user experience, accelerate the video play speed, and reduce cache time and video play delay.

ZTE’s Pre5G voice and big video solution can help operators deliver high-quality user experience, enhance user stickiness, and improve their brand competitiveness.