Beginner’s Guide to 3G-324M MONA

By Oren Libis

MONA is a call setup time reduction technique used in 3G-324M. In the past several weeks I have noticed that a lot of handset developers and operators out there – not members of the IMTC, are a bit confused at what MONA is and how it really works.

The 3G-324M Activity Group in the IMTC is working hard in the past year on MONA. We’re doing interoperability testing whenever we can and we are going to meet again during October 8-12 for a face-to-face interoperability event with MONA as one of the main items.

What is MONA?

MONA is a call setup time reduction specification for 3G-324M. It is a set of 3 different techniques: MPC, SPC and ACP. I won’t go into the technical aspects of each, but it is important to understand the following points:

1. Each of these techniques alone can reduce call setup time to below 1 second.
2. Each of these techniques has its advantages and disadvantages – this is why MONA specifies three different techniques and not only one.

MONA Classes

3G-324M MONA specifies in addition to these 3 techniques, 3 different classes. 3G-324M products need to support only one of these classes. Each class indicates which of the 3 techniques (MPC, SPC and ACP) need to be implemented:

• Class 1, which requires MPC, SPC and ACP
• Class 2, which requires MPC and ACP
• Class 3, which requires SPC and ACP

The different MONA classes are interoperable with each other. For example, if two handsets support MONA, one supporting class 1 and the other supporting class 2, the call that will be established will either end up using MPC or ACP; if one supports class 2 and the other supports class 3, the call will simply use ACP.

What does is mean to you?

• If you are a developer, you should choose to develop the class that makes the most sense to you in terms of resources, footprint, memory and time to market.
• If you are a mobile operator, you should not force vendors to support a specific class – let your vendors choose their own class – in the end result, you will still get below 1 second of call setup time and you will be giving the vendors some flexibility.

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