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Riding the WiMax Velocity Curve
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There are continuing market pressures for both telecom equipment manufacturers and service providers to get to the market quickly with WiMax elements. Given the time constraints, they will not be able to depend on the traditional build models. During this Webinar we will present alternative strategies for creating WiMax network elements rapidly.
Mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e-2005) is one of the most hotly anticipated technologies in telecom history. However, unlike some other technologies that produced a buzz before their commercial debut, mobile WiMAX already has the service provider and telecom equipment manufacturer (TEM) commitments necessary to ensure that it will become a widely deployed, mainstream technology rather than a flash in the pan that never lived up to its potential.
That outlook also has a downside: It means that the mobile WiMAX market will be highly competitive, forcing TEMs and their service provider customers to look for every opportunity to differentiate themselves and improve their chances of success. Today, there are already more than 400 WiMAX Forum member companies.
For TEMs, one way to reduce cost, risk and time-to-market is to use AdvancedTCA® (ATCA) technology, which provides an effective way to leverage industry-standard, off-the-shelf solutions for mobile WiMAX infrastructure such as ASN (Access Services Network) Gateways. For service providers, ATCA-based mobile WiMAX infrastructure provides the flexibility and scalability necessary to support long-term growth in both subscribers and services.
Why QoS is Key
The WiMAX Forum defines several baseline requirements for ASN Gateways:
- L2 (Layer 2) connectivity with user devices
- Transfer messages to the customer’s home operator for AAA (Authentication Authorization Accounting) tasks
- Discovery of available WiMAX networks and the customer’s preferred operator
- Relay functionality for establishing L3 (Layer 3) connectivity with devices
- Radio resource management, similar to the tasks performed by cellular BSCs (Base Station Controllers)
ASN Gateways also can support tasks such as:
- Accounting agent functions
- Handoffs
- Tunneling
- DHCP
- Header compression, in order to maximize radio resources
- IPv4/6 forwarding
- QoS (Quality of Service) enforcement
- Mobile IP
Due to the location of the WiMAX architecture, the ASN Gateway can’t be the weak link in the QoS chain. This requirement highlights the value of an ATCA chassis capable of enforcing QoS which must be capable of delivering high bandwidth for QoS to manage. To meet that demand, ASN Gateways should use ATCA solutions based on 10-Gigabit Ethernet. Unlike 1-Gigabit ATCA platforms, 10-Gigabit products also have the ample bandwidth necessary to accommodate growth in subscribers and services.
The Ideal ASN Gateway
The ideal ASN Gateway should be highly flexible. For example, as processors become more powerful, the gateway’s design should allow CPU cards to be easily removed and replaced with faster models. That ability is important because the ASN Gateway’s fast-path requirements – such as per-packet ACLs (Access Control Lists) and QoS – require a lot of processing power, so the ability to leverage the latest and greatest CPUs is a major asset.
RadiSys’s ATCA chassis, featuring Cavium network processors paired with RadiSys’ datapath software – such as QoS and IP-forwarding mechanisms – deliver the WiMAX Forum’s baseline requirements for ASN Gateways. This approach benefits TEMs by providing a turnkey solution, thereby reducing their cost, risk and time-to-market. This design also frees TEMs to focus their resources on developing innovative features that help their ASN Gateways stand out from the pack.
Some RadiSys customers have used their own custom AMCs (Advanced Mezzanine Cards) within RadiSys ATCA architecture in order to meet their business and market requirements. That’s another example of the flexibility that ATCA provides.
RadiSys has also partnered with Aricent®, a pioneer in mobile WiMAX software solutions, to provide a ASN Gateway software solution. Aricent provides two variants of ASN-Gateway software, ideally suited for deployment on an ATCA platform. The first variant is a control plane solution, capable of integration with any third party fast path, and can be easily paired with the RadiSys datapath software running on Cavium network processors. This variant also provides flexibility of distributing the ASN gateway processing capabilities across multiple ATCA blades to realize industry benchmark performance.
The Aricent ASN Gateway can also leverage the high availability support of the ATCA platform to provide a carrier grade field deployable solution.
The second variant of the Aricent ASN-Gateway provides the complete integrated control plane and data plane, which can be deployed on an ATCA platform as clusters of aggregated ASN Gateways. The high availability feature of the ATCA platform can be leveraged to provide n:1 or n:m redundancy depending on the end customer requirement.
And as competitive as mobile WiMAX is shaping up to be, TEMs can use every advantage they can get.