Openwave's Multi-Pronged Traffic Mediation Approach Efficiently Manages Data Congestion Without Compromising User Experience

(Editor’s Note: This article refers to a video interview shot in San Jose as part of TMCnet’s “On the Road” video series. To view the entire library of videos from Road Shows and other industry shows, as well as product demos and interviews in our in-house studio, visit TMCnet Videos home page.)

The widespread proliferation of mobile devices has resulted in an exponential growth in data traffic, also sometimes referred to as data Tsunami. This surge is data traffic is primarily being driven by video. According to the Cisco (News - Alert) VNI Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, video will be responsible for the majority of the traffic growth between 2009 and 2014. For instance, the Cisco report indicates that 66 percent of the 3.6 Exabytes per month of mobile data traffic by 2014 will be contributed by video.

 With this explosion of video traffic, mobile network service providers are faced with the challenge of effectively managing exponential growth in data traffic without diminishing end user experience. To address this issue, Openwave Systems has developed a traffic mediation solution called Media Optimizer. In a presentation given to TMC’s (News - Alert) Rich Tehrani, Openwave’s director of business development and strategic marketing Indranil Chatterjee talked about how the company’s new release Media Optimizer was allowing operators to tackle this problem in a multi-pronged approach.

“It’s a robust solution that allows operators to compress anywhere from 30 to 70 percent without giving diminished user experience,” commented Chatterjee. Besides content aware bandwidth compression, he talked about other features of the product such as smart caching, which reduces core network traffic and improves user experience through faster video delivery, just-in-time video delivery, dynamic bandwidth management, and device aware optimization. While just-in-time video delivery adjusts the video bit-rate according to real-time network conditions to ensure continuous video playback without any stalls or jitters, device aware optimization takes into consideration device’s capabilities and encodes media content in a bit-rate suited for each device.

When asked about solutions complying with video formats, Chatterjee promptly brought Tehrani’s attention to Media Adapter that quickly resizes media file or a stream to a format suitable for mobile handsets. It supports next generation streaming protocols, such as HTTP-PD (progressive download) and HTTP-AS (adaptive streaming). And, thereby, enables operators around the world to deal with congestion from video traffic, explained Openwave’s (News - Alert) director of strategic marketing.

The discussion next moved on to policy management. Here, Chatterjee’s focus was on another Openwave product called Smart Policy. With ability to understand different dimensions of policy management, it helps operators make more dynamic and informed decisions on how to best manage existing network resources in real-time based on detailed and actionable traffic insights, such as online behavioral patterns and service plans, network conditions, device and application/content mix.

Next, Tehrani wondered if this product also lends itself to another product in the analytic space, allowing carriers to determine what packages are most successful. And, which ones may reduce churn or increase ARPUs. Very well said was Chatterjee’s response. And, he added, “There is incredibly large volume of data flowing through operator’s network today. The challenge is how to take that data and convert it into actionable insights.”

“Our Analytics platform exactly does that,” asserted Chatterjee. In essence, it helps service provider understand the user demographics before recommending service, concluded Chatterjee.

For the detailed interview, check out the video below: