Leveraging Standards for Endpoint Management and Converged Service Assurance

As subscribers increasingly buy emerging IP services, one of the greatest pain points network operators are experiencing is the lack of visibility into service performance at their customers’ homes and offices.  Without endpoint performance metrics, it is difficult for network operators to properly detect and solve service issues before problems impact the customer.  The current resolution generally involves deploying costly field/network technicians to conduct on-site troubleshooting and diagnostics.  By reducing these expensive deployments (truck rolls and technician time) with more automated remote management capabilities, network operators can save significant costs, reduce MTTR, and provide a better service offering. 

These automated remote management capabilities collect and report performance metrics from endpoint devices, as well as provide the ability to extend this information to management applications that can correlate the metrics, provide end-to-end service visibility, and measure and monitor QoE.

The implementation of standardized remote management capabilities also provides both network operators (service providers and enterprises) and equipment manufacturers with competitive QoS advantages.  Increasingly, equipment vendors are supporting standards -- such as SIP, RTCP, RTCP-XR, TR-069, SIP Media Loopback, and NCS Loopback -- in their various customer premise devices that allow providers to harvest endpoint performance and quality intelligence.  

As more functionality is moved out to endpoints, and network operators roll out real-time, interactive applications and services, monitoring end-to-end service performance and quality becomes even more critical.  Collecting endpoint performance metrics allow network operators to: 

• Provide a single source of performance management to deliver multi-vendor endpoint quality and service performance monitoring 
• Improve customer satisfaction, problem resolution, and overall operational efficiency
• Leverage existing infrastructure and standards to collect and correlate third-party performance metrics 
• Support application-centric testing and monitoring of voice, video, and data 
• Provide QoS/QoE metrics reporting and service performance visibility 

Having visibility into endpoint devices allow network operators to verify installations, continually improve operational efficiencies, reduce troubleshooting resolution times, validate performance and quality levels, and ensure the overall success of their various converged services. 

Kaynam Hedayat
CTO & VP Engineering
Brix Networks