AdvancedTCA Support of Wireless Flow-Based Routing

By Karl Wale, Continuous Computing

Long Term Evolution (LTE), Femtocells and WiMAX are all major developments in the wireless industry. Many operators now offer “always connected” data-driven services. How must the core network evolve to remain efficient and cost-effective? How can it cope with huge increases in customers and traffic?

Functions such as security, authentication, QoS, traffic management, content delivery, service management and billing must be provided at the network edge where access technologies are aggregated. They all require the network to understand the traffic with deep packet inspection (DPI) techniques being used to extract application and payload information. They also require high speed, with data rates above 10 Gbps, especially when millions of subscribers are involved.

Bladed systems are particularly well-suited to delivering the required functionality and scalability. AdvancedTCA systems are ideal because they can support non-Ethernet-related connectivity. Typical systems reside in-line with network traffic and are essentially invisible to users and servers. They provide aggregation, security, billing, and traffic management functions.

Within an AdvancedTCA system, the ingress and egress paths are centralized on dual redundant switch blades to deliver high availability (i.e., 99.999 percent uptime). These blades are connected over the backplane fabric to the payload (e.g., compute) blades. Should one switch fail, the second one becomes active with no service interruption.

AdvancedTCA DPI line cards process flows at line rate using “fast path” functions. They perform tasks such as GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP) tunneling and encryption (IPSec or SNOW 3G), as well as routing, forwarding and load balancing.  They also provide intrusion detection / prevention (IDS/IPS) and denial of service (DoS) protection.

Mass storage at the network edge is another emerging requirement. As demand for data and video services increases, caching becomes more important because commonly used content can be stored at the edge cost-effectively, thereby reducing end-to-end bandwidth requirements and network congestion. Terabytes of storage are necessary in even the smallest edge aggregation devices, which is feasible with AdvancedTCA because such solutions are already available at reasonable cost.

Pre-integration and optimization of wireless protocols is also critical for reducing time to market, increasing system performance, and reducing cost per user. The FlexTCA™ System from Continuous Computing is an example AdvancedTCA system that optimizes Trillium® wireless protocols (including new LTE core network protocols for multi-core and multi-threaded processing environments) and is pre-integrated with SAF-compliant high availability middleware.  The FlexTCA system even includes pre-defined load balancing application notes and sample configurations for specific network requirements.

The access network is evolving quickly, and the core network likewise will need considerable upgrades to support the changes. Off-the-shelf solutions are essential to meet cost and performance requirements in a timely manner. Fortunately, the AdvancedTCA ecosystem offers an extensive range of pre-integrated system software, protocols and specialized DPI applications to allow network equipment providers to support rapidly expanding femtocell, WiMAX and LTE-based services and capabilities.

Karl Wale is Director of Product Line Management at Continuous Computing. You can reach him at karl.wale@ccpu.com.