Mobile traffic management company Vasona announced a new feature to its SmartAIR platform, allowing operators to more precisely manage mobile traffic based on time and location.

SmartTUNING allows operators to address individual cell sites to better distribute mobile traffic produced by social media, browsing, video, or audio. Think of how a load balancer distributes network traffic, but for mobile.

“The cell sites are connected via backhaul to an aggregation site, which doesn't have an official name. At the aggregation site, there is generally a switch or router which might aggregate 100 to 500 cell sites. The aggregation site is generally where Vasona is deployed, and one of our installations processes the traffic from all of those sites,” says John Reister, VP of product and marketing with Vasona.

Operators treat cells in suburban areas the same way they treat cells in dense urban areas, where the usage is not distributed the same, says Reister. As a result, operators spend more money on spectrum and capacity in some areas, rather than optimizing the traffic flows of user data.

Vasona SmartAIR sits in between a network’s RAN and core — on the user data interfaces. It figures out which users are in the same cell sector and are contending for the same network resources. SmartAIR can differentiate between browsing, social media, encrypted video, audio, and other application capabilities and manages the bandwidth contention taking place between them.

SmartTUNING allows operators to zone in on specific cell sectors during busy hours of the day — during a concert, sporting event, or rush hour — and accommodate the high-traffic cell sectors in order to optimize the end user experience. SmartTUNING allows operators to prepare for particular events, during a certain time of day, or at a specific location, rather than applying a broader approach at all times, says Reister.

“Busy hours might be different for a cell that serves a stadium, versus a transit center, versus a suburban area,” Reister explains. A cell has peaks and valleys in traffic, and Vasona tries to smooth out traffic.

Vasona targets mobile operators, and one of its most notable customers is the Spanish telco provider Telefonica. Vasona is currently deployed on 100,000 cells spread across the U.S. and Europe.

It is based in San Jose, California and has about 70 employees.