MCI INTERVIEW
MCI EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
Why optimisation matters
MCI talks to Dr. Constantine Polychronopoulos, founder and chief technology officer of mobile internet infrastructure specialist Bytemobile about the extent of the problem caused by the mobile data boom and the solutions available to operators.
F
or many people, says Constantine Polychronopoulos, the definition of optimisation as it relates to
mobile networks is too narrow; re- stricted to compressing data or to the tweaking of the radio access network in a bid to improve throughput. While these are key elements of optimisa- tion, he says, the term ought to be interpreted far more broadly. “The best way for us to think of optimisation,” he says, “is as a set of synergistic tech- nologies that come together to address everything that has to do with improv- ing network and spectrum utilisation and user experience. If you stretch the argument, it includes pretty much every thing that matters. This holistic, end-to-end approach to optimisation is the hallmark of Bytemobile’s solu- tions. Point products tend to be costly and difficult or impossible to evolve and maintain.” And optimisation matters, he says, because the boom in mobile data traffic experienced in some of the world’s most advanced mobile mar- kets represents a serious threat to carrier performance and customer satisfaction. US operator and pioneer iPhone partner AT&T is a case in point, Polychronopoulos says. “If you look at what’s been said by
Ralph de la Vega (president and CEO of AT&T Mobility) and John Donovan (the firm’s CTO), they have seen a 5,000- per cent increase in data traffic over the past two years. The data points from other operators are similar,” he continues. “They see an exponential growth of data traffic with the intro- duction of smartphones, in particular the iPhone.” Operators may have received what
they’d been wishing for but the scale of the uptake has taken them by surprise, Polychronopoulos says. The type of usage consumers are exhibiting can
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“An IP packet can be up to 1,500
bytes long,” he says. “So at layer three, while you can balance packet by packet, there is only so much you can do to optimise 1,500 bytes. At the top layer, the application can be mul- tiple megabytes or gigabytes if you’re watching video. And when you’re dealing with those file sizes in the application layer, there is a whole lot more you can do to reduce the amount of data or apply innovative delivery algorithms to make the content more efficient,” he says. By optimising content such as video,
Polychronopoulos says, significant gains can be made in spectral and backhaul network utilisation. A range of options are open to operators, he says, with some techniques focused on optimising the transport protocol, and others designed to reduce the size of the content. “With video, we can resize the frame,
Constantine Polychronopoulos CTO, Bytemobile
be problematic as well. Bytemobile is seeing a great deal of video-based us- age, which can often be a greater drain on network resource than web brows- ing. Given the increasing popularity of embedding video content within web pages, the problem is becoming exacerbated. Dr. Polychronopoulos is keen to
point out that there are optimisation opportunities across different layers of the OSI stack—Bytemobile offers solutions that will have an impact on layers three (the IP layer) through seven (the application layer). But he stresses that some of the most ef- fective returns from optimisation technologies come from addressing the application layer, where the bulk of the data is to be found.
we can reduce the number of frames, we can reduce the resolution of the frame or apply a combination of the above in a way that does not affect the video quality but greatly improves net- work efficiencies,” he says. “So if you go to a site like YouTube and browse a video, you might download something like 100MB of data. But if you were to go through a platform like ours, you may download only 50MB when the network is congested and still experi- ence not only the same video quality, but also fluid video playback without constant re-buffering stalls.” It is possible, he explains, to run
these solutions in a dynamic way such that data reduction engages only when the network is congested. If a user seeks to access high-volume data like video during the network’s quiet time, the reduction technologies are not applied. But when things are busier, they kick in automatically and gradually.
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