The future of critical voice and data: converged communications platforms

The future of critical voice and data:
converged communications platforms
Jonathan Stubing
March 2016

Complex Solutions, Delivered Simply.COMPLEX SOLUTIONS, DELIVERED SIMPLY
About Me
 Principal ICT Consultant at Titan ICT
Consultants in Perth, Western Australia
 BEng (Elec, Telecoms) at ANU (2006) and MEng
(Elec) at Curtin (2017)
 >10 years experience consulting to utilities,
telecoms, transportation, and resource/energy
 A background in strategy, planning, design,
deployment and optimisation of cellular networks

Today’s presentation
 Why convergence?
 What is convergence?
 How to enable critical communications?
 How to ensure resilience & performance?
 The roadmap & benefits

Why convergence?
 The need for efficiency and innovation is driving convergence to broad-
band mobile (and fixed) networks.
 The past required reliable and prioritised voice – narrow-band cellular
networks designed for limited mission-critical use cases.
 The future demands reliable/best-effort and prioritised/first-come-first-
served voice, video and data – broad-band cellular networks designed for
broad mission-critical/non-critical use cases.
 The critical communications industry needs to embrace this change – or be
left behind – but continue to convey the needs of the ‘critical’ users.

Why convergence?

What is convergence?
 There are various definitions: circuit-packet, IT/OT, telecoms/information
industry etc.
 In the context of critical communications it means mission/non-mission
critical, voice/data/video, and fixed/mobile.
 The convergence of mission-critical/non-critical requires service
differentiation, prioritisation, segregation, and security.
 The convergence of voice/video/data requires assurances on packet
delay, jitter, error, loss and throughput.
 The convergence of fixed/mobile platforms requires mobility of sessions,
profiles, services, devices and networks.

What is convergence?
 The need to evolve from a vertically-integrated to horizontally-integrated
implementation of the access, transport, service and application layers.

What are the enabling standards?
 The ITU-T through the 3GPP and TISPAN (now TC NTech) are driving the
standardisation of the architectures for convergence – encourages industry
and vendor alignment.

What are the enabling technologies?
 The key architectures are: Next Generation Networks (NGN), Long Term
Evolution (LTE) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).
 The key technologies are: Internet Protocol (IP), Multiprotocol Label
Switching (MPLS), Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access
(OFDMA), Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), and Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP).
 A common and converged platform for multiple applications, services and
users – like ships in the night.

What are the enabling functions?
 User Equipment (UE) and eNodeB (eNB) for radio resource access and
management.
 Serving Gateway (S-GW) and Packet Gateway (P-GW) for the delivery of
unicast packets and interface to external IP networks.
 Broadcast Multicast Service Centre (BM-SC) and Multimedia Broadcast
Multicast Services Gateway (MBMS-GW) for the delivery of multicast and
broadcast packets.
 Mobility Management Entity (MME), Policy & Charging Rules Function
(PCRF) and Home Subscriber Server (HSS) for network mobility,
identification, authentication, service policies and session QoS.

 IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Group Communication System (GCS),
Mission Critical Push-To-Talk (MCPTT) and Proximity Services (ProSe)
for call control, group calls, private calls and device-to-device.
 The key ‘differentiators’ for critical communications ‘enabled’ converged
networks are: GCS, ProSe, isolated network operation, high-power
terminals, priority and pre-emption.

 These key ‘differentiators’ will be ratified in the 3GPP the Release 13
standards in 2016 – meaning vendor products should be available by 2018!

How to ensure performance?
 The 3GPP defines Key Performance Indicators (KPI): accessibility,
retainability, integrity, availability and mobility.
 MCPTT KPI 1a: Access Time <300ms for 95% of all MCPTT requests.
 MCPTT KPI 1b: Access Time <300ms for 99% of Emergency Group and
Imminent Peril MCPTT requests.
 MCPTT KP2: Access Time <1000ms end-to-end for all MCPTT requests
where the Group Call has not yet been established prior to MCPTT request.
 MCPTT KP3: a Mouth-To-Ear Latency <300ms for 95% of all voice bursts.

How to ensure performance?
 MCPTT KPI 4a: maximum Late Call entry time <150ms for 95% of Late Call
entry into unencrypted calls.
 MCPTT KPI 4b: maximum Late Call entry time <350ms for 95% of Late Call
entry into encrypted calls.

How to ensure resilience?
 A high level of hardware redundancy – e.g. N+ or 2N redundant fans, power
supplies, line cards, interfaces.
 A resilient and fast converging switching/routing fabric and meshed network
topology.
 A high level of redundancy in network resources – e.g. MME pooling, S/P-
GW load balancing, IMS load balancing, AS pooling.
 The possibility of ‘cloudification’ and geo-redundancy for greater elasticity of
network resources.

How to get there?
 The period of convergence between ~2018 and ~2033 – mission-critical
data and then mission-critical voice.
 The US via FirstNet and the UK via ESN have already committed to
converged critical communications platforms for public safety.
 The resource/energy and transportation industries are likely to adopt
converged critical communications ahead of public safety in Australia.

How to get there?

What are the benefits?
 The main benefits are efficiency and innovation – leads to a safer, faster,
and more targeted response to critical situations or events.
 An improvement in operational intelligence for resource/energy
companies, enabling optimisation of supply chain.
 An improvement in situational awareness for public safety, enabling more
effective deployment of resources.
 An improvement in operational intelligence for utilities and transportation
companies, increasing the availability of services.

Why convergence?
 The need for efficiency and innovation is driving convergence to broad-
band mobile (and fixed) networks.
 The critical communications industry needs to embrace this change – or be
left behind – but continue to convey the needs of the ‘critical’ users.

Questions?

References
Liebhart R., Chandramouli D., Wong C., Merkel J., (2015), LTE for Public Safety, John Wiley & Sons
Nokia Networks, LTE networks for public safety workers
3GPP, TS 22.179 V13.2.0 (2015-06), 3rd Generation Partnership Project, Technical Specification
Group Services and System Aspects, Mission Critical Push To Talk (MCPTT) over LTE, Stage 1
(Release 13)
Mowafy H., Zeb Z., Telcordia, Presentation October 4, 2006, PSTN to IMS migration

The future of critical voice and data: converged communications platforms

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