Optimizing neighbor lists is the first crucial step to harmonious mobility in your 3G network. And Astellia offers operators business-oriented solutions to optimize them. Non-optimized neighbor lists lead to call drops and poor quality of service.

The 3G neighbor list optimization feature in Cigale Iub is a pertinent decision-making support that proved its efficiency in the field, for example by lowering the call drop rate by 2 points.

This optimization is performed in a 3-phase automatic process:

· Analysis of subscribers’ true traffic taking account of their mobility habits,

· Comparison between declared neighbors and effectively used neighbors,

· Display of decision results: keeping, adding or removing a relationship.

Neighboring statistics are aggregated over several days, gathering enough traffic to make decisions based on reliable statistics.

Adding neighbor relationships

The ability to discover new valuable neighbors is based on the ability of handsets to measure cells that are not directly described as neighbors.

· Transitivity: the neighbor of a neighbor can become an efficient direct neighbor,

· Some handsets are able to measure cells that are not declared as neighbors, related to “detected sets”. This feature has to be enabled on network equipment.

Removing neighbor relationships

As mobiles are limited in terms of the number of monitored cells, it is important to reduce neighbor lists to make sure that the most efficient neighbor cells are effectively measured by mobile handsets.

Geographical elements are very important when making decisions about neighbor relationships. Cigale Iub provides an embedded GIS and exports to Google Earth (registered trademark Google) displaying hills and mountains, thus showing topology constraints.

Based on this principle, Cigale Iub can also optimize 3G to 2G cell neighboring, providing more efficient UMTS to GSM mobility.

Astellia offers associated services, such as audits and technical assistance to detect neighbor anomalies and optimize the performance of your network.

About ASTELLIA – www.astellia.com

With strong experience in the telecom sector and constant in-the-field involvement, Astellia helps more than 130 mobile operators and equipment manufacturers worldwide to maximize the performance of their networks and offer an optimum quality of service (QoS) to their customers.

Astellia solution covers GSM/GPRS/UMTS technologies from radio access to core networks. Astellia provides easy access to a wide-ranging set of independent Key Performance Indicators and enables operators’ operational & marketing teams to forecast and, therefore, decrease network disturbance. This, in turn, increases revenue (infrastructure optimization, roamers’ capture, subscriber loyalty etc.).

Astellia also offers services such as network audits, technical assistance, training etc.