Indra leads european R&D project to improve the quality of telecommunications services

Indra, Spain's number one IT multinational and one of the leaders in Europe and Latin America, is heading the European R&D project IPNQSIS on the quality of the experience of users of telecommunications services. The town of Toro, Zamora, played host on 29 and 30 October to the plenary meeting of this proposal, which in addition to Spain includes the collaboration of three other European Union countries: France, Sweden and Finland.

The aim of IPNQSIS (IP Network Monitoring for Quality of Service Intelligent Support) is the definition of the requirements, the design and the implementation of a Customer Experience Management System (CEMS) prototype, which will be composed of three different levels: data sources (for example, probes), monitoring tools and a control module.

The ultimate goal is to improve telecommunications services and how users perceive them by using quality indicators to monitor the experience of the customers when making use of the services of an operator and applying this data to implement measures to improve the productivity of the applications, and, therefore, customer satisfaction.

IPNQSIS is a short-term, product-oriented R&D project that consists of focussing the established collaboration on specific areas to improve high demand services, that is, the design and construction of a prototype with suitable elements as a baseline for future adaptation to consumption markets.

Indra is collaborating in this initiative by applying its IP traffic monitoring solutions to supervise services such as multicast television, video on demand and pay-per-view. The results of the analysis will be applied to the integrated management of network resources to improve the user's experience. The company's technology will also make it possible to develop tools to enable greater correlation between the quality of the service and the actual experience of the user, thereby ensuring greater customer satisfaction.

International recognition and collaboration

The IPNQSIS consortium led by Indra is made up of 18 members belonging to the main companies, universities and research centres of the European telecommunications industry. In addition to Indra, the Spanish consortium, which is developing the project within the framework of the PRINCE (Industrial Product for Experience Quality Management) project, is made up of the companies Alcatel-Lucent, Dycec and Broadcom and two startup companies established by the Autonomous University of Madrid (Naudit) and the Technical University of Madrid (SoftTelecom). It is co-funded by the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness through the Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI). The PRINCE project's responsibility within IPNQSIS will be the adaptation of IPTV survey devices, Quality of Service (QoS) measuring tools, and mechanisms to quantify the Quality of Experience (QoE), its correlation with the QoS parameters, and their influence on QoE.

The other countries taking part in the project, France, Sweden and Finland, are collaborating through the companies Ericsson, IP-Label newtest, Vierling, Alkit Communications, Procera Networks, EXFO NetHawk Oyj and PPO Yhtiöt Oy; institutions such as the Polytechnic University of Paris and Lund University; and the Acreo (Sweden) and VYY (Finland) technology centres.

IPNQSIS has the European Union's Eureka/Celtic Quality Seal, thanks to the positive evaluation of its conclusions. Eureka is an intergovernmental initiative to support cooperative R&D and innovation in the European scope with the aim of fostering the competitiveness of European companies with technology projects oriented towards the development of products, processes and/or services with a clear commercial interest in the international market based on innovative technologies.

The results of this European project can objectively be considered to be of great quality given the amount of papers (40) published in leading international symposiums, publications and conferences (IEEE ICC, WWIC, IEEE ICCIT, IM IEEE, QoMEX, TRAC IEEE, Future Network & Mobile Summit, and Telecom I+D, among others) and the seven standards (HomePlug, IEEE and VQEG) it has generated.

Indra

Indra has vast experience in the provision of services in the telecommunications and media market. The company's systems provide services for more than 240 million customers worldwide. Moreover, three of the world's ten largest operators are Indra customers.

Indra is the leading technology multinational in Spain and a leader in Europe and Latin America. It is the second European company in its sector in terms of R&D, with €550 million invested in the last three years. Its turnover in 2011 was €2.688 billion, and more than half of its income is currently from international markets. The company employs 40,000 professionals and has customers in 118 countries.