Smart Users Need Smart Policies

by Matthieu Lachance, Openwave Product Technologist Architect

The increasing popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices is bringing greater volumes of data to the mobile operators’ networks, challenging the quality of their service delivery and putting pressure on their margins. In this environment, mobile operators are moving toward more comprehensive traffic and application policy management.

Tiered levels of service give mobile operators a flexible way to control the data consumption on their networks, monetizing high data consumers and providing incentives for low consumers to use more. Another technique is to offer flat-rate, unlimited usage add-ons for a related applications, (e.g. a messaging bundle would include SMS, MMS, E-mail and Facebook).

Obviously, the more creative and targeted these service plans get, the more flexible the policy management solution needs to be. A core part of any policy management solution is the capability to store and deliver subscriber policies across large distributed networks in real-time to support policy enforcement for each flow, transaction, etc. This requires scalable storage systems that can be geographically distributed across wide areas to ensure low latency access for every policy enforcement point over the area served. In 3GPP-standard language this capability is referred as a Subscriber Profile Repository (SPR) or a User Data Repository (UDR).

Whatever you call them, they are basically high-tech databases, but the devil is in the details. Ultimately, the operator will decide what kind of data they want to store. But the trend toward flexible and innovative service plans requires the storing and serving up of dynamic profiling data.

The best solutions will be fast (low read latency, high throughput read and write), reliable and scalable. Operators cannot treat their SPR solution as just a regular database project and for that reason, we offer Openwave Smart User Repository (SUR). SUR is a fast and scalable subscriber profile storage that has been deployed at many mobile and broadband operators for authentication and for general user application profile and policy management. Our largest deployment serves over 2.5B transactions a day with only a few milliseconds latency.