Amdocs White PaperFenruary 2015

Answering challenges of the VoLTE era

Amdocs White PaperApril 2015

Boost business agility with charging Virtualization

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Overview

The pace of the communications market has never been more frantic. Barriers are constantly being broken down as the hyper-connected world penetrates our daily lives at an ever-increasing rate. Data is the new king of communications, with the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, wearables and other devices pushing the envelope, accompanied by increasing rates of data consumption. As a result, service providers are being forced to constantly reinvent themselves with new services, catering to new verticals and providing a better customer experience. Still, this must all be accomplished while continually devising better business models, lowering expenditure to support it, and with over-the-top (OTT) providers breathing down their necks.

But service providers are getting the hang of it. While embracing rather than fighting OTT providers is one thing, it is also important to learn from these digital native companies and their increasing usage of virtualization and cloud technologies.

Virtualization plays an important part in the ability of service providers to support new services, as well as their capacity to easily scale up to support growing needs, introduce new services quickly and make operations easy. Indeed, a recent survey of over 2,000 industry professionals conducted by Telecoms.com Intelligence and partially sponsored by Amdocs, found that 28% of respondents said they plan to move to virtualized business support systems (BSS).

This paper looks into virtualizing an important part of any BSS stack: the charging system, specifically focusing on the real-time aspects of charging, which are harder to virtualize due to the required performance goals.

Virtualizing real-time charging

Modern charging systems are fully convergent, flexible, and operate in real time. They can support all lines of business (wireline, wireless, pay TV, broadband, etc.) on a single system, which opens up a multitude of possibilities for interesting marketing bundles, with true cross-line business discounts (e.g., for every pay-per-view you order this weekend, we’ll grant you 100Mb on your data plan). Convergent charging systems can also consolidate real-time or online prepaid needs with offline postpaid demands. They have the ability to support all access technologies, from SS7 to IMS-based LTE and VoLTE, all in one system. This gives service providers all the flexibility and tools they need to compete in the rapidly changing market of the hyper-connected world.

An important aspect of convergent charging systems is their ability to support real-time needs. In the past, this was handled by IN-based prepaid systems, but today this is the responsibility of a convergent charging system.

When virtualization was introduced in the early 2000s, it was limited to offline IT systems, leaving the more real-time, mission-critical services out of the virtualization circle. There

are many challenges when virtualizing a real-time system, most of which center on separating the applications from the underlying hardware and adding a software layer. Most of the time, when virtualizing, mission-critical systems are optimized to take full advantage of the hardware they run on and a virtualization layer is added. But this creates concerns about added latency and a decrease in performance.

In many service provider data centers, most IT systems are already running on virtualized platforms, and things are moving forward with the spread of network functions virtualization (NFV). Some offline billing systems, for example, have already made this move. As a result, IT departments have gained many advantages in terms of operability, flexibility, as well as lower CAPEX and OPEX due to savings in both hardware and the ability to support more operations with fewer resources.

But the time has now come to add virtualization support to real-time, convergent charging systems. The concerns over virtualizing a real-time charging system center on the latency and performance gaps that may be introduced by the virtualization layer (the hypervisor) – the resource management process that abstracts the physical machine from a highly hardware-optimized system. If the charging

system is built correctly and the implementation is conducted using the virtualization platform capabilities (the hypervisor), latency is kept low and the virtualized charging system performance is only insignificantly impacted by the change. Experience has proved that a true virtualized converged charging system can be easily and honestly compared to a charging system that runs directly on a physical machine. It is like comparing apples to apples.

In the aforementioned Telecoms.com Intelligence survey, 28% of respondents said that virtualizing BSS stacks is high on their agenda. This is significant because charging systems make up a large part of those BSS stacks. Regarding the upgrade timeline, most service providers responded that they plan to upgrade within a year or two.

Source: Telecoms.com Intelligence Industry Survey 2015

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Benefits of virtualized charging

Virtualized charging systems hold many benefits for service providers. Decoupling software workloads from hardware enables great agility and flexibility to grow while streamlining the charging system.

Indeed, many service providers have already begun the virtualization journey, with entire data centers being transformed. For instance, AT&T have declared that by the year 2020, as a part of their domain 2.0 vision, 75% of their customer-facing network will be virtualized1. Many other service providers are taking a similar path, making sure that every upgrade or addition to the architecture can be virtualized.

This has an immediate and simple benefit for virtualized convergent charging. The ability to fit into a future architecture and be part of a larger ongoing NFV transformation gives CTOs and CIOs the peace of mind that whatever next-generation architectures they might devise, they are covered in terms of monetization tools and strategies.

Operational ease with automatic scalability

At the heart of convergent charging, the real-time engine processes events as they arrive from the network in a matter of milliseconds. Simple logic will show that when more events arrive, there is a need for more processing units. Usually, when charging systems are deployed, they are built in accordance with a capacity planning process: the traffic is examined and the system is configured with a sufficient number of processing engines.

When a convergent charging system is deployed on physical servers, this means that enough hardware needs to be dedicated to the needs of the charging system. But traffic may fluctuate, resulting in spikes in activity; this is sometimes is planned, such as the FIFA World Cup finals or unplanned, such as a news-related spike in network traffic. For physical servers, more capacity can be added to support the largest expected spike to ensure that service is not impeded. This means that for most days of the year, those extra machines remain unused, while continuing to consume power and operational resources.

With virtualization, capacity planning is easier. More virtual machines can be easily added as needed to ease system load. The operational benefits of such a move are many. First of all, IT departments can allocate any servers they have available, since the hypervisor abstracts the hardware and enables the charging system to operate normally.

The benefits of virtualization become even more prominent when it comes to scalability. The ability to scale out and back in is essential for flexibility and operational ease. Whether for a planned or unplanned scenario, the virtualized charging system adds more virtual machines and as a result, more event processing to easily handle the surge in events that require rating and processing. The automation of this scaling process has a great impact on operability, since there is no need to prepare for weeks for a planned spike in network activity or connect mostly unused servers to support an unplanned surge in demand.

1 Published on AT&T’s Innovation Space blog, John Donovan, SEVP of AT&T technology and operations wrote “By 2020, we plan to virtualize and control over 75 percent of our network using this new software-defined architecture to meet the growing demands of data and video-hungry users.”, John Donovan, February 2014

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Cost reduction

Cost reduction is usually associated with virtualization, and is considered one of its greatest benefits. When convergent charging is virtualized, the bond to the physical server is broken and automatic scalability is enabled. The impact of automatic scalability for virtualized charging systems is even greater when considering that due to the self-management ability of the system, not only hardware usage but also the workforce can be used differently. The most important benefit is a positive user experience, since improved charging system availability ensures subscribers do not encounter denied service or other related issues.

Virtualzation as an innovation driver

Let’s assume that someone in marketing has come up with a great idea for a new business model, or someone in network management wants to check how a charging system will react to new VoLTE events from a recently deployed LTE network. The barriers to try, test and try again are lowered once a copy of the virtualized convergent charging system can be quickly set up. Deploying a specific charging system for testing makes it easy and efficient to test out new ideas, with little or reduced effort from IT departments. If needed, changes can be made to the virtualized copy to check all new ideas, and there is no impact on the production systems, which may continue to run on the same environment, unharmed.Innovation is the fuel that powers the communication

market. And lowering the barrier to test new concepts on

virtualized, yet fully operational charging systems adds

real benefit to the process.

A first step in the nfv journey

Many service providers today have already begun their

journey towards NFV. Their goal is to virtualize the data

center and evolved packet core, which runs the 4G-LTE

networks. This journey is long and not easy, as deep

transformations such as these take time and effort. The

fact that everything is connected is a challenge, and picking

one isolated virtual network function to start with is not easy.

But experience has shown that to a great extent, charging

is decoupled from other network functions. This is therefore

an easy starting point from which to test the water.

In terms of network functions, convergent charging systems are single-purpose and self-contained. They connect to

different network elements using standard 3GPP interfaces and can work with non-virtualized functions. This means that service providers can start by learning from their own experience with virtualized charging systems when they approach the bigger challenge of virtualizing the evolved packet core.

Amdocs’ virtualized convergent charging and billing solution

Amdocs Convergent Charging and Billing is the industry’s leading solution for real-time charging across all services, networks, and customer types.

The Convergent Charging platform is part of Amdocs’ BSS suite and provides service providers with a comprehensive, pre-implemented solution for all their charging needs, including:

• Real-time integration of Amdocs’ charging and policyproducts based on the latest industry standards (3GPP Release 11) for advanced data services

• Greater flexibility with support for any policy chargingand rules function (PCRF) – standard or non-standard

• A unified, optimized framework for defining the businesslogic of offers, rating, and policy

• Real-time service control, notif ications, and usagequeries across any service and customer

• Pre-implemented support for next-generation convergentdata and intelligent network services using business building blocks

Amdocs Convergent Charging and Billing is fully capable of running in virtualized environments. When looking at virtualizing a convergent charging system that operates in real time, the biggest concerns are latency and availability. As discussed previously, the idea of adding a hypervisor between the real-time charging system and the computing platform could give the impression that latency and high availability would be detrimentally impacted. Amdocs however, has virtualized its convergent charging system, which is now capable of running on a full virtual environment in real time. Benchmarking the virtualized charging system has shown that its high performance, low latency and high availability functions are maintained, rendering it fully comparable to the same system running directly on top of physical servers 2.

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2 For more information, see joint press release with VMware at http://www.amdocs.com/news/pages/amdocs-demonstrates-virtualized-real-time-charging.aspx

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by scaling event processing out and in. Workload is automatically balanced between all available processing units, while processing units are added to automatically handle both spikes in the network and increased demand. When demand subsides, the added units may be removed to lower the charging system’s footprint. All this is achieved via real-time self-monitoring, which triggers scaling within minutes with no manual intervention,sst importantly, without any service interruption. The entire process adheres to all the concepts of operational ease mentioned above.

A virtualized deployment of Amdocs Convergent Charging is currently running in production, and in real time at several of Amdocs’ largest customers, processing hundreds of millions charge events per day in one Tier-1 North American customer, for instance.

Conclusion

Virtualizing convergent charging is a natural evolution of modern charging systems. The real-time concerns associated with virtualization can be overcome. The greatest benefits that will arise from this process are around the ease of operations and the ease of innovation, leading to an increase in business agility, better service to subscribers, as well peace of mind for service providers who seek to manage their charging systems and leverage them for monetization innovation. This way, the charging system can serve as the first stepping stone in the long journey towards true NFV.

About Amdocs

For 30 years, Amdocs has ensured service providers’ success and embraced their biggest challenges. To win in the connected world, service providers rely on Amdocs to simplify the customer experience, harness the data explosion, stay ahead with new services and improve operational efficiency. The global company uniquely combines a market-leading BSS, OSS and network control and optimization product portfolio with value-driven professional services and managed services operations. With revenue of $3.3 billion in fiscal 2013, Amdocs and its more than 20,000 employees serve customers in over 70 countries.

Amdocs: Embrace Challenge, Experience Success. For more information, visit Amdocs at www.amdocs.com

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