April 6, 2012
Wireless Network Services: Disaster Monitoring and Recovery
Category F5 tornado (upgraded from initial estimate of F4) viewed from the southeast as it approached Elie, Manitoba, on Friday, June 22, 2007. (Photo credit: Justin1569 at Wikipedia)
In 2011, the United States experienced its worst tornado outbreak in more than 50 years. And communication systems were not spared from the carnage.
In the video below, Robert Young, senior manager for Aviat Networks’ Americas TAC/NOC explains how the company’s San Antonio network operations center (NOC) and its expertise in disaster monitoring and recovery helped microwave communication systems rebound from severe weather challenges. He details how the Aviat Networks Technical Assistance Center (TAC) and NOC team provided support for customers during the 2011 tornado outbreak.
One of the special services Aviat Networks’ NOC offers is in the form of Special Event Recovery and Monitoring. Two of Aviat Networks’ major customers were directly affected by the 2011 tornado outbreak. The storms were tracked, and the customers were preemptively notified of the storm tracks. Approximately 600-plus tornadoes were monitored in one week, and Aviat Networks managed disaster recovery of more than 300 outages due to the storms.
February 21, 2012
A Timely Update on Wireless Security
Wireless Security Components
Traditionally, microwave networks have been unsecure—unsecure as far as any purpose-built payload encryption or secure management is concerned. Until recently, it was deemed essential only for the most confidential microwave communications of financial firms, defense agencies and government, where the law can require them. But now billions of people around the world rely on the Internet to deliver varies types of data traffic ranging from personal messages to financial transactions. This value and volume of traffic makes it an irresistible target for cyber criminals. As security measures are implemented in other parts of the network (core, access) it is fundamental to implement strong security measures in microwave networks.
Aviat Networks Strong Security suite for the Eclipse Packet Node microwave radio platform prevents the following attacks on the network:
Front door attack: Traditionally microwave networks have not encrypted their payloads. With many networks transitioning from TDM to IP not encrypting payload traffic is the equivalent “of leaving the front door unlocked.” Hackers, cyber criminals and even foreign governments could try to access the air link using methods such as the “man in the middle” to read unencrypted data streams. Aviat Networks’ solution is to implement Payload Encryption that protects all traffic over the air link including user data and Eclipse management data in the payload.
Backdoor attack: Unsecured NMS can be used to change the radio configuration, sabotage or divert traffic using network management. With Aviat Networks’ Secure Management all Eclipse Packet Node management and control commands are secured over unsecure networks.
Insider attack: Disgruntled employees or cyber criminals that have obtained inside access to the network can use this access to divert traffic or upload malware to the network. Aviat Networks implements complete AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting) capability through a RADIUS server that can be used to prevent, or if happens, track and identify an inside security breach.
Covering all vulnerable areas of a microwave network, Aviat Networks’ Strong Security provides the toughest standards-compliant security protection in the market.
Eduardo Sanchez
Marketing Engineering Specialist
Aviat Networks
Related articles
- What is Mission Critical Microwave? (aviatnetworks.com)
- Cyber security report: All countries lag behind the bad guys (infoworld.com)
November 24, 2011
How Many Radio Options Are You Juggling?
Balancing cost and performance is a tough act for most operators dealing with telecom networking, especially when it comes to equipment procurement. Getting all the bells and whistles can sometimes result in having a lot of options to choose from. Often times microwave users have to juggle with a variety of radio options that suit a particular site requirement, for example, having to select between low power or high power radios to meet varying distance or system throughput/gain needs. Depending on location and licensing requirements, this may even translate into different products types for different frequency bands. More products result in more spares to maintain in inventory, along with added support and maintenance, inevitably leading to higher costs.
To help address this challenge, Aviat recently unveiled the industry’s first universal outdoor unit (ODU) to support software- defined base and high power modes in a single ODU, with Aviat’s unique Flexible Power Mode (FPM) capability. FPM allows operators to optimize both cost and performance, minimizing their overall total cost of ownership, by paying for the power they need only when needed. As a result, operators can procure a single ODU for multiple locations and via a simple software licensing mechanism, remotely adjust the transmit output power to meet the needs of a particular site. No need to spare multiple radios, nor deal with the operational burden of managing and supporting a variety of product options.
Additionally, operators can apply this flexibility to migrate from legacy low power, low capacity radios to a high power and performance ODU to support much greater link throughput, without having to change their installed antennas. This minimizes both their CAPEX and OPEX while migrating their network from a legacy low capacity TDM microwave link to a high speed Ethernet one.
So while juggling may still be a well needed skill to survive in Telecom, Aviat is reducing the load when it comes to microwave networking. Click here to find out more.
Errol Binda
Senior Solutions Marketing Manager
Aviat Networks
Related articles
- Hybrid Microwave for Wireless Network Backhaul Evolution (aviatnetworks.com)
October 14, 2011
What is Mission Critical Microwave?
Public safety agencies with first responder assignments, mobile service providers with national footprints, and utilities companies all have communication networks carrying mission critical applications. These networks require robust, secure and powerful microwave radios.
So what are the defining characteristics of Mission Critical Microwave?
- Hybrid (TDM and IP): Native TDM, native IP. No proprietary emulation or encapsulation.
- RF performance: Superior system gain. Adaptive Coding and Modulation.
- Reliability: 100+ year proven terminal (1+0) MTBF.
- Strong Security: Secure Management to prevent unauthorized access. Secure payload encryption to prevent eaves-dropping.
- Bullet Proof Redundancy: Full port, card, system level redundancy. Integrated T1 loop switch (USA).
- Physical Design for Usability: Front access, no hidden cables. Compact footprint. Expansion port.
But delivering Mission Critical Microwave extends far beyond products and deals with the way a company behaves and treats its customers including:
- A mindset that integrates uncompromised commitment to design and to building the most robust, secure and dependable microwave radios;
- A culture of innovation to ensure the most innovative new microwave products are being developed to meet the needs of your critical applications;
- Engineering professionals that are there at your side before, during and after any equipment deployment, to help you at every step of the way;
- A commitment to customer service and support so that customers can depend on their chosen vendor.
At Aviat Networks, we believe one of the things that sets us apart is our focus on Mission Critical Microwave. For critical applications it’s extremely important that customers have comprehensive local support at their fingertips. Our products are usually supported locally, so our customers know they’ll have immediate access to professional engineers when they need them, without waiting for out-of-country spares or support, including escalation to Tier III level technical support if needed.
At Aviat Networks, our engineers have been designing and building microwave networks for over 50 years. We are the microwave experts, because it’s all we do.
Gary Croke
Senior Product Marketing Manager
July 27, 2011
Managing Wireless Networks with Element Management Systems
An EMS can be thought of as managing all the elements in a complex network, keeping them all in balance. Image by michael.heiss via Flickr
Managing a wireless network is essential. Radios, routers and third-party add-ons control vast amounts of valuable user data. Any wireless network downtime damages the user’s business and the operator’s long-term reputation. Thus, operators need a powerful but easy-to-use element management system (EMS) to monitor and administer all the disparate elements in their wireless communication networks.
Also, operators should be able to manage complete networks from a user-friendly interface, which must provide all the necessary information for fast network management system decision-making. And this system must be capable of complete standalone operation or being integrated into an operational support system using NorthBound Interfaces (NBIs).
Other additional functionality in the form of event management and notifications capability is also necessary in an EMS for wireless networks. An EMS should inform wireless operators about network events and device failures and let them to diagnose problems and apply network updates remotely. This reduces the time between a fault occurring and the fault being repaired. It may even allow a repair to be completed before a wireless link fails completely. For day-to-day management, operators need an EMS that can:
- Deploy, manage and auto-discover wireless equipment—including all Aviat Networks devices, partner products and third-party devices
- Display an entire network at once, via one of several map views
- Provide an overview of network events
- Deliver notifications of important network events
- Enable analysis of network events, device events and performance data
- Generate detailed reports on all aspects of a network
The ProVision EMS solution can manage all Aviat Networks wireless solutions, partner wireless equipment and third-party devices from a user-friendly GUI.
Fortunately, such a carrier-class EMS solution does exist. Aviat Networks develops its ProVision EMS based on customer demand and continues to upgrade it as per user requests and requirements. For customers, implementing ProVision is vastly more efficient than developing an in-house EMS, saving time, resources and money. Aviat Networks EMS solutions are the most cost-effective way to manage wireless solutions. Aviat Networks works closely with customers to make sure that ProVision is user-friendly. The goal is that ProVision EMS allows operators to manage their networks proactively—rather than reactively—and with reduced network operating costs.
Look for future blog posts on must-have EMS data features and stats on operators using carrier-class EMS.
Mick Morrow
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Aviat Networks
Related articles
- Ten of the world’s most disastrous IT mistakes (pcauthority.com.au)
- The Truth about the Wireless Bandwidth “Crisis” (mobileopportunity.blogspot.com)
- FabLab helps the developing world set up long-distance wireless Ethernet (hackaday.com)
- Network Services from Aviat Networks’ Network Operations Center (aviatnetworks.com)
- Aviat Networks Interoperability Lab for Wireless & Network Testing (aviatnetworks.com)
July 20, 2011
Hybrid Microwave for Wireless Network Backhaul Evolution
Image via Wikipedia
There is no one-size-fits-all wireless network backhaul solution. What will work for some operators’ mobile backhaul will not work for others. Many operators have large installed bases of TDM infrastructure, and it is too cost-prohibitive to uninstall them wholesale and jump directly to a full IP mobile backhaul. There is going to be a transition period.
The transition period will need a different breed of wireless solutions. Fourth Generation Hybrid or Dual Ethernet/TDM microwave radio systems provide comprehensive transmission of both native TDM and native Ethernet/IP traffic for the smooth evolution of transmission networks. They will enable the introduction of next-generation IP-based services during this transition period.
We will explore this category of digital microwave technology for wireless backhaul, which is becoming ever more important as the 4G LTE wireless revolution gets underway with all due earnestness, even while the current 3G—and even 2G—networks continue to carry traffic for the foreseeable future.
Our current white paper builds on Aviat Networks‘ previous April 2010 white paper titled “What is Packet Microwave?” and provides market data from recent industry analyst reports that demonstrate the significant and continuing role of TDM in mobile backhaul networks and some of the prevailing concerns of operators in introducing Ethernet/IP backhaul services.
Related articles
- Solving the backhaul dilemma (fiercewireless.com)
- Groundbreaking plunge into the super-fast future (smh.com.au)
- Backhaul for the Mobile Broadband or Wireless Broadband Network (aviatnetworks.com)
- Small Cell Mobile Backhaul: The LTE Capacity Shortfall (aviatnetworks.com)
- iPass builds Wi-Fi exchange to expand operators’ data offload reach (connectedplanet.com)
If you’d like to talk to someone about the ideal wireless network backhaul solution for you, please click here.
June 24, 2011
Mobile Security Requires More Than Secure Wireless Devices
Image via Wikipedia
When people think of mobile security, they usually think of encryption for their smartphones, tablet computers such as the BlackBerry PlayBook or other wireless devices. Or they think of a remote “wipe” capability that can render any lost device blank of any data if some unauthorized party did in fact try to enter the device illegally. These wireless solutions are all state-of-the-art thinking in the mobile security community. And many wireless equipment OEMs and third-party mobile security providers offer them.
But they only protect the data on the devices. They only protect so-called “data at rest” once it’s been downloaded onto the iPhone or iPad. They don’t speak to the need to cover “data in motion” as it is transmitted over the air. Some parts of the over the air journey are protected by infrastructure in the form of Wi-Fi and GSM. One is notoriously subject to human failing to enable security and the other has been broken for sometime. And then there is wireless security for backhaul. In this area, there has not even been an industry standard or de facto standard established. And most microwave solutions providers don’t even offer options for wireless security on the backhaul.
Fortunately, this is not the case across the board. Strong Security on the Eclipse Packet Node microwave radio platform offers three-way protection for mobile backhaul security: secure management, payload encryption and integrated RADIUS capability. Read the embedded overview document in full-screen mode for more details:
Related articles
- Security Focus as Wireless Traffic Rises, Mobiles Get More Powerful (aviatnetworks.com)
- 2 Ways to Beef Up Your Wireless Defenses and Frustrate Hackers (brighthub.com)
- Troubleshooting Your iPad’s WiFi Issues (brighthub.com)
- Protecting Pacemakers From Hackers (blogs.forbes.com)
- Comprehensive Embedded Security in Microwave (Wireless) Networks (aviatnetworks.com)
April 29, 2011
Synchronization Over Microwave Mobile Backhaul Networks
Synchronization is creating quite a stir in the mobile backhaul industry as operators are wrestling with a variety of synchronization technology options including Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) and Precision Time Protocol (PTP) a.k.a. IEEE 1588v2. This paper reviews unique microwave backhaul characteristics that need to be taken into account in support of synchronization, and how each particular synch approach can be addressed.
April 20, 2011
Unlocking Capacity Block Through Higher Order Digital Modulation
If you are reading this post, then you probably have heard about “4G”, the 4th generation cellular network. For a cell phone user, 4G means improved data speeds that allow faster delivery of multimedia-based applications, see our previous post, What is 4G?, for more details. On the other hand, the network operator desires to spend a minimum on upgrading network infrastructure and prefers to buy a backhaul solution that supports current and near future capacity demands of a cellular network.
Thus, it is important to improve the capacity of wireless backhaul links. To increase transmission capacity, wider channel spacing can be used. However the wireless spectrum is expensive and may not be available in some countries. Using transmission in high frequency bands, such as 60 GHz and above, provides the bandwidth needed to increase capacity. However, very high radio frequencies increase the cost of radio components. In addition, 60 GHz links limit transmission range due to high absorption of radio waves by the atmosphere, making this solution somewhat cost inefficient. One efficient way of improving the capacity of a communication link is to increase the order of the digital communication modulation scheme used for transmission.
In simple terms, digital modulation is the process of mapping a group of data bits into an information symbol that gets transmitted, after up-conversion to the radio frequency (RF) of the link. The most popular digital modulation scheme used in wireless radios is known as quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). For a given symbol rate, increasing the modulation order, or equivalently packing more bits per symbol, would be an effective way to increase the capacity of a microwave link. For example, each symbol in a 64-QAM signal represents 6 data bits, while for 256-QAM and 1024-QAM signals it represents 8 and 10 data bits, respectively. Therefore, 1024-QAM provides (theoretically) a 25 percent increase in capacity over 256-QAM and an impressive 67 percent increase in capacity compared to 64-QAM.
The price paid for achieving such an increase in capacity is more complex signal processing algorithms and stricter requirements for channel quality, e.g. higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver is required. In that case, increasing the modulation order for some networks under normal operating conditions can have a diminishing return on throughput. This is due to the fact that the required SNR for an acceptable receiver performance rarely can be met.
Why this is the case? Let us briefly discuss the challenges in increasing the modulation order. Higher modulation order results in larger pool of symbols available for transmission. For example, for 64-QAM, there exists 64 symbols in a 2D grid (known as constellation points) compared to 1,024 symbols for 1024-QAM for the same grid size. Clearly, increasing the number of symbols (assuming fixed power) makes the symbols closer to each other in this 2D grid. Thus, data detection at the receiver becomes more susceptible to errors due to impairment.
In practical terms, receiver circuits are affected by thermal noise, clipping and non-linearity of power amplifiers, phase noise and many other distortions that are beyond the scope of this post. It is worth mentioning that increasing the signal power beyond some limits results in actually decreasing the received SNR since many of these distortions associated with RF circuits are dependent on the transmitted power. Rather, the way to increase the modulation order is to improve the detection schemes and build circuits that are less susceptible to power-related distortions, along with improving the correction mechanisms at the receiver for phase noise and other impairments.
At Aviat Networks, we have the expertise and knowledge to build the highest quality microwave radios that can work at cutting edge signaling schemes. We will make sure that our customers see a sizable return—not a diminishing one from increasing the modulation order. Our pledge is that microwave backhaul will always exceed the capacity requirements of our customers.
Ramy Abdallah,
Senior Signal Processing Engineer, Aviat Networks