Partner:
To gain competitive advantage in today’s mobile market, network benchmarking is crucial to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). Mobile network benchmarking refers to the process of evaluating the MNO’s network performance and comparing the quality of service against competitors. Benchmarking programs enable operators to substantiate market competitiveness, support claims for advertising and marketing campaigns, and optimize their network performance. MNOs use to require independent benchmarking companies to perform drive tests to check coverage and capacity of their networks in order to identify problems and improve network performance in a certain geographical area. The high efforts for executing drive testing results in high costs and therefore in a low frequency of execution, typically this kind of measurement is executed no more than 2-3 times per year in a network while changes in the network and the radio environment happen on a much more frequent basis.
In this context, the main objective of this MONROE-LTE project is to develop and test a LTE network benchmarking system for QoS and QoE that will be a cost effective solution for MNOs and regulators, creating a new business opportunity for Allbesmart.
MONROE-LTE has successfully used the MONROE concept, its software (scheduling platform, the experiment description language, and databases) and modified hardware (MONROE nodes with voice capability), to evaluate our company Platform-as-a-Service business model, consisting on using affordable, customized, mobile radio probes and an intuitive dashboard to provide valuable insights on network (radio and IP) key performance indicators (KPIs) and customer experience.
A complete set of analytic tools and dashboards for analysing and displaying, in a user-friendly manner the collected data, including voice and video analysis has been developed (the commercial name of this framework is UXPERT). For the voice measurements, adaptations on the MONROE probes were designed. The final measurements campaign has been performed in Lisbon for the 3 main MNOs operating in Portugal.
The results of the project were disseminated in many venues: ANACOM (Portuguese regulator), ALTICE (MNO), FASTWEB (MVNO), CELFINET (drive tests company), Japan IT WEEK, CONNECT research centre and CROWNCOM17 conference (best demo award).
The knowledge developed in the scope of MONROE-LTE project has been used to develop our own commercial product (UXPERT). Thanks to this project we have brought UXPERT ready for market exploitation.
The MONROE project has opened a new business opportunity for allbesmart as provider of an affordable network benchmarking framework that is competitive and aligned with the state-of-the-art drive tests solutions existing in the market.
Open Source code is available here:
https://gitlab.com/allbesmart/MONROE-LTE/tree/master/