Testing, measurement and security firm JDSU on Friday acquired geo-location and RAN planning specialist Arieso for $85m in cash.

JDSU will absorb Arieso’s product line to boost its portfolio in helping operators to address the rapidly growing deployment of small cells and challenges associated with limited spectrum capacity. Arieso’s location offerings store and analyse data from billions of mobile connection events that translate into intelligence to help optimise network performance, improve customer experience and create new revenue-generating services.

Indeed, the Telecoms.com Intelligence Survey 2013 found that small cell offload was the most popular technology consideration for operators over the next 24 months with 60 per cent of the almost 2,000 respondents rating it as ‘important’ or ‘very important’.

The RAN optimisation and self-optimised networks (SON) markets are expected to grow from approximately $700m today to more than $1bn by 2015 and Arieso’s bookings for calendar 2012 were approximately $27m, the company said.

Listed in the Telecoms.com’s Industry Leading Ladies supplement in 2010, Shirin Dehghan, an engineering graduate founded Arieso in 2002. She started her career developing radio propagation products for a UK startup, before joining Vodafone as a research engineer.

At Vodafone she was responsible for the development of WCDMA simulation and business modelling and served on Vodafone UK’s 3G auction team, where she provided technical input to the UK board.