Month: July 2019

4G/Long Term Evolution (LTE), VOLTE

4G/ Long Term Evolution (LTE)

LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and is a registered trademark owned by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) for the wireless data communications technology and a development of the GSM/UMTS standards.

  • Both radio and core network evolution
  • All-IP packet-switched architecture
  • Standardised by 3GPP
  • (+) Lower CAPEX ans OPEX involved

LTE evolved from an earlier 3GPP system known as the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), which in turn evolved from the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). Also it is aligned with 4G (fourth-generation mobile)

It is backward compatible with GSM/EDGE/UMTS/CDMA/WCDMA systems on existing 2G and 3G spectrum, even hand-over and roaming to existing mobile networks.

Motivation for evolution – Wireless/cellular technology standards are constantly evolving for better efficiency and performance.LTE evolved as a result of rapid increase of mobile data usage. Applications such as voice over IP (VOIP), streaming multimedia, videoconferencing , cellular modemetc.

It provides packet-switched traffic with seamless mobility and higher qos than predecessors. Also high data rate, throughput, low latency and packet optimized radioaccess technology on flexible bandwidth deployments.

Timeline of Evolution 

  • GSM  : calls  on circuit switching ( CS ) between 2 parties for communication. Dedicated circuits are used for voice and SMS.
  • GPRS : packet switching (PS) is introduced for data services
  • UMTS / 3G : network elements begin evolving into PS . No changes to core.
  • EPC / LTE/VOLTE : No circuit switched domain at all .

LTE Performance

Peak Data Rate

  • uplink – 75Mbps(20MHz bandwidth)
  • downlink – 150 Mbps(UE Category 4, 2×2 MIMO, 20MHz bandwidth), 300 Mbps(UE category 5, 4×4 MIMO, 20MHz bandwidth)

Carrier bandwidth : Range from 1.4 MHz up to 20 MHz. Ultimately bandwidth used by carrier depends on frequency band and the amount of spectrum available with a network operator.

Mobility 350 km/h

Coverage 5 – 100km with slight degradation after 30km

LTE architecture supports hard QoS and guaranteed bit rate (GBR) for radio bearers.

Technology used in LTE

All interfaces between network nodes are IP based in LTE.
Duplexing – Time Division Duplex (TDD) , Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and half duplex FD

MIMO ( Multiple Input Multiple Output ) transmissions Allows the base station to transmit several data streams over the same carrier simultaneously.

Multiple Access Schemes

  • uplink: SC-FDMA (Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access) 50Mbps+ (20MHz spectrum)
  • downlink: OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) 100Mbps+ (20MHz spectrum)
  • Multi-Antenna Technology, Multi-user collaborative MIMO for Uplink and TxAA, spatial multiplexing, CDD, max 4×4 array for downlink

Modulation Schemes : QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM(optional)

4G/ LTE Architecture

Primarily composed of 3 parts UE, E-UTRANand EPC.

1. User Equipment (UE)

  • Mobile Termination (MT)
  • Terminal Equipment (TE) 
  • Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC) : also known as the SIM card for LTE equipments. It runs an application known as the Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM).

2. Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN)

handles the radio communications between the mobile and the evolved packet core. High level representation for  eNodeB or eNB

Role of eNB : sends and receives radio transmissions to all the mobiles using the analogue and digital signal processing functions of the LTE air interface. eNB also controls the low-level operation of all its mobiles, by sending them signalling messages such as handover commands.

3. Evolved Packet Core (EPC)

This sub system resembles IMS environment.

SGW (Serving Gateway) for routing and forwarding of user data packets

Packet Data Network (PDN) Gateway (P-GW) communicates with the outside world simillar to GGSN ( GPRS support node ) and SGSN ( serving GPRS support node ) in UMTS and GSM.

Home Subscriber Server (HSS) is a central database that contains information about all the network operator’s subscribers. Almost simillar to HLR/AAA in 2G /3G architcture.

Mobility management entity (MME) controls the high-level operation.

LTE Roaming Service

For a roming user in Visited-PLMN, the user is connected with the E-UTRAN, MME and S-GW of the visited LTE network. However, LTE/SAE allows the P-GW of either the visited or the home network to be used, as shown in below:

For roaming prepaid charging, accounting flows are made to access prepaid customer data, via P-Gateways or CSCF in an IMS environment.

VoLTE ( Voice over LTE)

A-SBC (Access Session Border Controller) consists of P-CSCF and ALG/AGW. This connects access network (LTE) to IMS core.

  • Connect IP networks, including IPv4 and IPv6 interworking, NAT traversal, etc.
  • Security
    • DDos prevention
    • Topology hiding
    • Encryption
    • P-CSCF maintains the security associations between itself and the UE
  • QoS control
  • trancoding
  • media service handling using Application layer gateway (ALG) access gateway (AGW)

Core IMS has

  • I-CSCF (Interrogating Call Session Control Function) which provides Location service to find the correct S-CSCF for each subscriber
    •  for peer networks the I-CSCF is the first point of contact.
  • S-CSCF (Serving Call Session Control Function) SIP session management and routing
    • connect to HSS for policies
    • invokes Application Servers (TAS, IPSMGW)

Telephony Application Server (TAS) is the application layer of the telecommunication system which adds intelligience and business logic to the platform. We can design call flows and usecases such as

  • address normalization
  • call diverting/ forwarding/ forking
  • Smart screening/ barring( whitelisting , greylisting , blacklisting)
  • It connects to MRF – Media Resource Function
    • media mixer or as a media server for tones, announcements

To proivide compatibility with 2G , 3G and prior systems ths archietcture has

IPSMGW enable support for SMS over SIP 

MGCF – Media Gateway Control Function to support Circuit switched network

BGCF – Breakout Gateway Control Function to find routing based on ENUM/DNS (e.g. PSTN number)

Interop between 3G and LTE user endpoints

Interoperation between IMS networks

Interoperation between multiple IMS networks and LTE operators

Interconnect Session Border Controller (I-SBC) handles the boundary where service providers interconnect and exchange inbound outbound SIP sessions. It consists of

  • Interconnect Border Control Function (IBCF)
    • Inter-Working Function (IWF)
  • Transition Gateway (TrGW)

Voice over Wifi and WebRTC with LTE

Voice over Wifi and WebRTC with LTE

TWAG or ePDG gateway is used to integrate the Wireless LAN access network into the Mobile Network Packet Core – EPC Network.

TWAG (Trusted Wireless Access Gateway) in the Wi-Fi core provides trusted access to the UE( User Equipment). The TWAG is then connected directly to the P-GW (Packet Gateway) in the Evolved Packet Core (EPC).

LTE-Advanced

Advanced features planned for LTE include

  • LTE devices capable of CAT6 speeds (Category 6 )
  • Increased peak data rate – downlink 3 Gbps, Uplink 1.5 Gbps ( 1 Gbps = 1000 Mbps)
  • Spectral efficiency from 16bps/Hz in R8 to 30 bps/Hz in R10
  • Carrier Aggregation (CA)
  • Enhanced use of multi-antenna techniques
  • Support for Relay Nodes (RN)

References

Also read about previous generations of telecom namely 2 G and 3G

2G to 3G – generation of telecom

5G and IMS

5G and IMS

MIMO ( multiple-input and multiple-output )

SISO – Single Input Single Output
SIMO – Single Input Multiple output
MISO – Multiple Input Single Output
MIMO – Multiple Input multiple Output

Multiplying the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmission and receiving antennas to exploit multipath propagation.
Key technology for achieving a vast increase of wireless communication capacity over a finite electromagnetic spectrum.

Antenna configuration – implies antenna spatial diversity by useing arrays of multiple antennas on one or both ends of a wireless communication link
boost channel capacity.
combats multipath fading
enhance signal to noise ratio,
create multiple communication paths

Applies to wifi
IEEE 802.11n (Wi-Fi), IEEE 802.11ac (Wi-Fi)
as well as cellular networks
HSPA+ (3G)
WiMAX (4G)
Long Term Evolution (4G LTE)
power-line communication for 3-wire installations as part of ITU G.hn standard and HomePlug AV2 specification

Large capacity increases over given bandwidth and S/N resources
Greater throughputs on bands below 6 GHz,

multi-user MU-MIMO

simultaneous independent data links to multiple users over a common time-frequency resource

massive MIMO

enable the expansion of the useful spectrum to microwave and millimeter wave bands within the framework of 5G cellular communication.

microdiversity MIMO

MIMO modes (60m)

Diversity – Alamouti algorithm
Beam forming – create and aim the antenna pattern electronically
Spatial multiplex – use of precoding and shaping to unravel the multipath signals

challenges faced by mobile equipment vendors implementing MIMO in small portable devices.

Functions

3main categories: precoding, spatial multiplexing (SM), and diversity coding.

Precoding

multi-stream beamforming ( signal is emitted from each of the transmit antennas with appropriate phase and gain weighting such that the signal power is maximized at the receiver input ) , increases reception and reduce multipath fading

In line-of-sight propagation, beamforming results in a well-defined directional pattern. However, conventional beams are not a good analogy in cellular networks, which are mainly characterized by multipath propagation. When the receiver has multiple antennas, the transmit beamforming cannot simultaneously maximize the signal level at all of the receive antennas, and precoding with multiple streams is often beneficial. Note that precoding requires knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter and the receiver.

Spatial multiplexing

High-rate signal is split into multiple lower-rate streams and each stream is transmitted from a different transmit antenna in the same frequency channel. If these signals arrive at the receiver antenna array with sufficiently different spatial signatures and the receiver has accurate CSI, it can separate these streams into (almost) parallel channels.

increasing channel capacity at higher signal-to-noise ratios (SNR).

Diversity coding

when there is no channel knowledge at the transmitter , a single stream is transmitted. The signal is emitted from each of the transmit antennas with full or near orthogonal coding. Diversity coding exploits the independent fading in the multiple antenna links to enhance signal diversity.

Ref :
https://www.comsoc.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIMO

NLP ( Natural Language Processing ) in VoIP

NLP ( Natural Language Processing ) can be defined as the automatic manipulation of natural languages ( text or audio) using computer algorithms and softwares. As such NLP has great potential in cognitive and artificial intelligence , but also with increasing human to machine interaction and enhancement in Machine learning ,NLP is set to revolutionize the Voice over IP space.

Note : although not obvious but some people confuse Natural language procession with Neurolinguistic pressing which is a science in Psychology.

NLP evolves from linguistics which itself is a study of language along with its semantics , phonetics and gramer. Every language has rules and NLP uses mathematical formulation to understand it. Discrete mathematical formalisms will be discussed later in this article.

Inputs for NLP is usually though conversation, speech, correspondence, reading, print, written composition, dictation, publishing, translation, lip reading, signing etc .

Rule based vs Statistical NLP – In contrast to rule based engines which work on hard preset values using maybe a decision tree , statistical models work in a more probabilistic fashion which produces more reliable results even in unfamiliar scenarios.

Linear classifier vs Convolutional Neural Nets– CNNs are powerful supervised deep learning technique. As opposed to a linear classifier whose decision boundary on feature space is linear function , CNN increases model complexity by adding more layers . tbd-

NLP tasks

Syntax

Grammer induction , lemmitization , morphological segmentation , part of speech tagging , parsing , sentence breaking , stemming , word segmentation , terminology extraction

Semantics

lexical , distributional , machine translation , Named entity recognition ( NER) , natural language understanding and generation, relationship establishment , sentimental analysis , work sense disambiguation , OCR( optical Character recognition) , recognizing textual entailment

Speech

speech recognition , specch segmentation , text to speech , dialogues

Discourse

automatic summarizations , conference resolution , discourse analysis

Key techniques

Out of above its worthy to point out few key techniques

Parts of speech (POS )

A primary tasks in NLP is to extract tokens and sentences, identify parts of speech ( like nouns , verbs , adjectives ) and create parse trees.

POS tagging is the process of marking up a word in a corpus to a corresponding part of a speech tag . By tagging, algorithm builds lemmatizers which are used to reduce a word to its root form.

POS methods significantly differs from Bag-of-words(BOW) methods which disregards semantic relation relationship and only takes into account words and their frequencies. Whereas POS takes context and definition into consideration.

POS tagging techniques include lexical , rule based , probablistic and deep learning methods.

Named entity recognition (NER)

Given a stream of text, determine which items in the text map to proper names, such as people or places, and their types such as person, location, Organization. Example for raw test as below using Spacy.io

“Hello ! My name is Atanai and I work on Solution design and architecture, developed many custom WebRTC and SIP based solutions such as telecom applications, media stream inetgration into IOT,Unified communication-collaboration ,signalling gateways ,SBC etc. I passed out from Anna university with Betch degree in 2011 and currenlty stay in Bangalore India.”

Analysis of NER is

Noun phrases: ['My name', 'Atanai', 'I', 'Solution design', 'architecture', 'many custom', 'WebRTC and SIP based solutions', 'telecom applications', 'media stream integration', 'IOT', 'Unified communication-collaboration', 'signalling gateways', 'I', 'Anna university', 'Betch degree', 'currently stay', 'Bangalore India'] 
Verbs: ['be', 'work', 'develop', 'base', 'signal', 'pass'] 
Atanai PERSON 
WebRTC PRODUCT 
SIP ORG 
IOT ORG 
Betch NORP 
2011 DATE 
Bangalore India LOC

Sentiment Analysis

Understand the overall opinion, feeling, or attitude expressed in given media ( speech , text or video) .

NLP in action

NLP application layout

Steps to obtain insights and relevant information from an unclassified document , raw tex file or speech to text content such as recording from VOIP meeting

step 1 : upload a document which could be an invoice , order , feedback , complaint or any other unstructured raw text

Step 2 : Collect the data from the document

  • use OCR (optical character recognition) for hand written or signed components
  • perform search , index , duplication detection etc
  • can use MNIST database as
  • phrase matching and vocabulary
  • Can use translation APIs to trans late from other languages

Step 3 : Collect meaning-full data

  • perform Part of Speech (POS) tagging and chunking process
  • topic discovery and modelling
  • tokenizations and text classification , obtain domain specific entities from the document
  • can use standard model language to collect relevant frequently used words
  • NER ( Named Entity recognition ) to validate names , places and locations
  • can extract out time and date from mentioned entities
  • build relationship graphs

step 4 : extract sentiments using a trained model

  • utilize Regular Expressions for pattern searching
  • sentiment analysis

General Applications:

Application of NLP find its way into many domains

1.VOIP platforms ,media servers and automatic summarization of conference / meetings like “Minutes of Meetings” to highlight the key takeaways from a VOIP session

2. Automatic essay assessment and scripting in education setting alike.

3. Image annotation using metadata describing digital images for categorizations and easy retrieval based on keywords.

4. Spam filtering

5. Building automatic assistants and chatbots with Speech Recognition and using auto suggest with sentence completion ( Siri , Alexa , google voice etc )

6. Social Media Analytics , to track sentiments about topic , figure out influencers such as for movie or restaurant reviews .

NLP in VOIP system

To know more about sound waves go here which describes fundamental characteristics of analog waves . To know more about analog wave modulation go here , this describes how waves are modulated such as frequency , phase , amplitude etc to hold information for propagation . click here to know more about digital wave modulation such as amplitude , frequency , phase shift keying etc . This section build on top of audio streams captured or live .

Based on NLP and trained models on extracted features ,an unknown audio wave can be classified and possibly identified.

NLP ( Natural Language Processing ) in VoIP

Replacing auto attendants with IVR

tbd–

Ref :

Tools ref:

WebRTC CPaaS ( Communication Platform as a Service )

A CPasS ( communication platform as a service ) is a cloud-based communication platform like B2B cloud communications platform that provides real-time communication capabilities. This should be easily integrable with any given external environment or application of the customer, without him worrying about building backend infrastructure or interfaces. Traditionally, with IP protected protocols, licensed codecs maintaining a signalling protocol stack, and network interfaces building a communication platform was a costly affair. Cisco, Facetime, and Skype were the only OTT ( over the top) players taking away from the telco’s call revenue. However, with the advent of standardised, open-source protocol and codecs plenty of CPaaS providers have crowded the market making more supply than there is demand. A customer wanting to quickly integrate real-time communications on his platform has many options to choose from. This article provides an insight into how CPaaS solutions are architectured and programmed.

SIP based Communication Platform as a Service

SIP and WebRTC are many a times closely knit together as protocl, and media plane techologies to build a communication platform such as CPaaS , UCC, B2b call agent , call centre applicatioinsso on. This integration expected to continue to evolve and improve in order to meet the growing demands of users for high-quality, low-latency communication.

Sample CPass Architecture build on open source technologies

Over all Archietcture of Real Time Comunication ecosystem with Media management, CDR , processing pielines , real time analytics.

Data Streams for realtime analytics and telemetrics

There are several assessment technologies that can be used for measuring the quality of WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) calls, including:

  1. Mean Opinion Score (MOS): A standardized method for measuring the quality of voice and video calls, based on human perception.
  2. Packet loss and jitter: Measures the amount of packet loss and variation in packet arrival times, which can impact the quality of a call.
  3. Round-trip time (RTT): Measures the time it takes for a packet to travel from the sender to the receiver and back, which can affect the delay in a call.
  4. Bitrate: Denotes the amount of data that is transmitted during a call, which can impact the quality of the audio and video.
  5. Codecs chosen can impact the quality and bandwidth requirements of the call.
  6. Network conditions
  7. Quality of Service (QoS): Measures the quality of the network connection and the ability of the network to support real-time communications.
  8. WebRTC specific metrics: such as video resolution, frames per seconds, audio level, and so on.
  9. PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality)  predict subjective opinion scores of a degraded audio such as warping , varioioable delays
  10. PSR( Peak signal to noise ration)

These technologies can be used in combination to provide a comprehensive assessment of the quality of a WebRTC call and to identify any issues that may be impacting the call quality.

I have written an article before on Steps for building and deploying WebRTC solution , which includes standalone, cloud hosted and TURN based NAT handler systems .

A typical CPaaS solution provides

  • Call server + Media Server that can be interacted with via UA
  • Comm clients like sipphones , webrtc client , SDK ( software development kits ) or libraries for desktop , embedded and/or mobile platforms .
  • APIs that can trigger automated calls and perform preprogrammed routing.
  • Rich documentation and samples to build various apps such as call centre solutions , interactive auto-attendant using IVR , DTMF , conference solutions etc .
  • Some CPaaS providers also add features like transcribing ,transcoding, recording , playback etc to provide edge over other CPaaS providers

Self hosted Datacentre vs Cloud server

Self hosted in DatacentreCloud server
Cost(-) Self-hosted datacenters can be more expensive to set up and maintain, as they require the purchase of hardware and ongoing maintenance costs.
(+) no monthly recurring fees to cloud vendors		(+) pay as you go
Scalability(-) maintenance of racks and servers
(-) requires planning for high availability and geographical deployment for redundancy		(+) no stress on resource management like cooling, rack space , wiring etc
(+) easy to setup
Reliability(-) limited to a single location and can be affected by local issues such as power outages.Cloud providers typically have multiple data centers and will automatically route traffic.
(-) outages in cloud infrastructures datacentre could lead to service disruption
Control and Security(+) more controlled for security or access(-) not in premise, security can be provisonoed by not in control

Cloud-based infrastructure 

Cloud Services as Amazon Web service, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Digital Ocean is great resources to host the multiple parts of a CPaaS system such as gateways, media servers, SIP Application servers, other servers for microservices including accounting, profile management, rest services etc. Often virtualized machines ( VMs) mounted on a larger physical remote datacentre are an ideal choice for VoIP and cloud communication providers.

Self hosted / inpremises Servers / private cloud

Marinating datacentre provides flexibility to extend and or develop tightly controlled use cases. It is often a requirement for secure communication platforms pertaining to government or banking communications such as turret phones.

Some approaches are to set up the server with Openstack to manage SDN ( software-defined network). Other approaches also involve VMWare to virtualize servers and then using docker container-managed via Kubernetes to dynamically spawn instances of server as load scaled up or down.

Using existing SDK vs building your own RTC platform from scratch

I have come across so many small size startups trying to build CPaaS solutions from scratch but only realising it after weeks of trying to build an MVP that they are stuck with firewall, NAT, media quality or interoperability issues. Since there are so many solutions already out in the market it is best to instead use them as an underlying layer and build applications services using it such as call centre or CRM services making custom wrappers.

Tech insights and experiences

Companies who have been catering to telco and communication domain make robust solutions based on industry best practices which beats novice solution build in a fortnight anyday.

Keeping up with emerging trends

Market trends like new codecs , rich communication services , multi tenancy, contextual communication , NLP, other ML based enhancements are provided by CPaaS company and would potentially try to abstrct away the implementation details from their SDK users or clients.

Auto Scaling, High Availability

A firm specializing in CPaaS solution has already thought of clustering and autoscaling to meet peak traffic requirements and backup/replication on standby servers to activate incase of failure

CAPEX and OPEX

Using a CPaaS saves on human resources, infrastructure, and time to market. It saves tremendously on underlying IT infrastructure and many a times provides flexible pricing models.

Call Rate charging and Accounting Services

Call Rates are very critical for billing and charging the users. Any updates from the customer or carriers or individuals need to propagate automatically and quickly to avoid discrepancies and negative margins.

CDR ( Call Detail Record ) processing pipeline

CDRs need to be processed sequentially and incrementally on a record-by-record basis or over sliding time windows.
CDR can also be used for a wide variety of analytics including correlations, aggregations, filtering, and sampling.

Updating rate sheet ( charges per call or per second )

The following setup is ideal to use the new input rate sheet values via web UI console or POST API and propagate it quickly to the main DB via a queuing system such as SQS. Serverless operations such as using AWS lambda can be used via a trigger-based system for any updates. This ensures that any new input rates are updated in realtime and maintain fallback values in separate storage as s3 bucket too

CDR (Call Detail Record ) managemenet, billing, dispute management

In current Voip scenarios a call may be passing thorugh various telco providers , ISP and cloud telephony serviIn current VoIP scenarios, a call may be passing through various telco providers, ISP and cloud telephony service providers where each system maintains its own call records and billing. This in my opinion is duplication and missing a single source of truth. A decentralized, reliable and consistent data store via blockchain coudl potentially maintain the call records making then immutable and non diputable. Some more details on the concept are in the article below.

Blockchain integarted with Voice over IP platforms