January 9, 2015

A new Radio Planning Tool (RPT) interface - defined in a new series of specifications from 3GPP SA5 - is set to reduce costs in the Operations Support System (OSS), by allowing Network Management level applications to read RPT site & antenna data via a standardized method.

The focus in 3GPP Release 12 has been on accessing this data in the RPT, which is needed by several applications, including those for the centralized SON and Inventory Systems.

Olaf Pollakowski, the Rapporteur of the 3GPP Work Item, says; “Network management application developers can now integrate the RPT in a fully standardized plug-and-play fashion. This reduces integration cost significantly compared to the situation before - where proprietary interfaces had to be integrated.”

3GPP SA5 has completed the work item in eight months. Christian Toche, the group’s Chairman, said; “The completion of the work, to meet the need for reduced integration costs, in such a short time demonstrates the ability of 3GPP to respond quickly to market requirements.”

Technical Challenges

• The introduction of the RPT required a change in the 3GPP Management reference model defined in TS 32.101. A new Network Management (NM) layer logical entity, separated from the functionality of the NM, was added. This entity is called NM Layer Service (NMLS) and connects with the Type-7 interface to the NM. The RPT is a kind of NMLS. Other kinds may be added in future. This approach ensured that the high level reference model is future proof with respect to the addition of other applications than the RPT.
• To access the RPT data a new RPT Access (RPTA) Integration Reference Point (IRP) was specified. This IRP is a so called Interface IRP featuring both the information model of the RPT data and the operation to read it. In Rel-12 site and antenna data from all sites can be read.
• The protocol used on the Type-7  interface is the SOAP Solution Set where the interface is specified in WSDL and the payload in XML Schema. The SOAP Solution Set is also available for other IRPs applicable to the Itf-N. Target for the RPTA IRP was to allow ease of integration as much as possible. For this reason also a new protocol solution was specified for this interface (HTTP Solution Set). In this solution the operation request is simply mapped to the Request message of HTTP-Get and the operation response to the Response message of HTTP-Get.  The message-body of the Response carries the returned RPT data. The payload is described by XML Schema. Alternatively also a JSON (Java Script Object Notation) instance document can be transferred. The approach with HTTP-Get in combination with JSON is extremely easy to implement and very popular in web programming. 

The new specifications in support of the Radio Planning Tool Access (RPTA) Integration Reference Point (IRP) are:

• 3GPP TS 28.667 “Radio Planning Tool Access (RPTA) Integration Reference Point (IRP); Requirements”
• 3GPP TS 28.668 “Radio Planning Tool Access (RPTA) Integration Reference Point (IRP); Information Service (IS)”
• 3GPP TS 28.669 “Radio Planning Tool Access (RPTA) Integration Reference Point (IRP); Solution Set (SS) definitions” 

Contacts:

• Olaf Pollakowski, Nokia Networks - Rapporteur of this SA5 Work Item
• 3GPP Contact – for general enquiries

Further reading: 

• 3GPP SA5 Home Page
• NGMN Top OPE Recommendations V1.0 (requesting a standardized interface to planning tools)