May 2004
Enabling The Next Generation Of Telecom
Applications
BY
MIKE WERNING
The telecommunications recovery will be driven by service providers
rolling out new services and generating new income streams. However, the
high cost of the infrastructure to support those services can limit their
profitability and act as a strong disincentive to invest. The technology on
which telecom equipment is based continues to evolve, with more and more
emphasis being placed on open standards. Could this be the catalyst that
drives down the cost of telecom infrastructure and helps to makes new
services profitable? Or is something more needed?
Challenges To Growth
It�s no secret that the telecom industry has struggled significantly in the
past few years. Reduction in capital and operational expenditures by the
service providers has had a devastating effect on system-level solution
providers at all levels. Solution providers have focused intensely on cost
cutting and finding ways to operate more efficiently. Their short term
solutions have revolved around optimizing existing equipment through
incremental upgrades and optimizing existing networks. Today, convergence in
the marketplace is starting to create a demand for new value-added services
like push-to-talk, interactive media delivery, services on demand, voice and
packet cable services, and video over DSL. New investments will be needed to
offer these services to subscribers while at the same time controlling the
rate of growth in capital expenditure.
The intense competition between telecom equipment manufacturers to
provide these new services is squeezing development time windows. This
increased time to market pressure coupled with the increased complexity of
these new designs has forced telecom equipment manufacturers to rethink
their value proposition. They must choose carefully where they want to focus
their scarce engineering and research resources. Investment in
non-value-added components will increase overall system costs while
sacrificing any competitive advantage gained due to a lack of focus on core
technologies. The high cost of proprietary system infrastructure can offset
a service provider�s incentive to invest in the new application or enhanced
service offering.
Evolution Toward Standardization
Telecom equipment, to a great extent, can be separated into two areas:
- Common, non-differentiating features that are required but don�t
necessarily add value in the end application; and
- Truly differentiating items that add value or give a competitive
advantage.
Common features are likely to be outsourced, and therefore, cost-minimized
based on economies of scale. Using standards-based commercially available
products is the best way to leverage the investment and momentum the
industry has created.
Standards have been a part of the telecom industry for the last 20 years.
In the computer industry, some could argue that the PC was the first attempt
to create a standard system architecture. Although not an official standard,
this effort resulted in the creation of an ecosystem of compatible hardware
and software. Economies of scale and intense competition has driven down
prices and proliferated this architecture into many different facets of our
life.
Technology offshoots from this market found homes in many telecom
system-level products. The PCI Bus, originally created to replace the many
custom microcomputer peripheral bus architectures in PCs, became the main
communications bus in CompactPCI bus systems. Today, packet-based
communications, driven by the explosion of the Internet, has become the
defacto transport standard. The latest incarnation of standards-based
systems created by the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG)
utilizes an embedded Gigabit communications network as its main transport
mechanism. These systems, unlike the PC, are based upon open standards.
Open standards have been reducing the cost of telecom system design by
allowing telecom equipment manufacturers to concentrate on the value-added
components of their product or application. Open systems provide common
infrastructure such as the chassis, power supplies, system management,
control plane computing elements and data plane transport elements. The
products are currently available as part of the value chain in the ecosystem
that formed around the development of the standard. As the price performance
of the individual elements improve, telecom equipment manufacturers can
perform upgrades to their systems while providing new revenue generating
services.
Preparing For The Future
As we look at the road ahead and anticipate the demands for next-generation
architectures, there are limitations in power and network transport that
lower the capacity of today�s systems. The desire to utilize
state-of-the-art general purpose processing technology is driving the need
for both increased power per slot and increased board space for
next-generation switching technology. In PICMG systems today, these
limitations can be worked around by utilizing new low-power processor
technology, which is being driven largely by the commercial laptop market.
When massive computing power is required by an application, the most compute
intensive functions can be moved to state-of-the-art rack mountable,
multi-processor servers.
However, if the system must go into a core network or central office
environment, the price performance advantage of generally available servers
is lost due to the additional cost of telecom environmental certification
(NEBS) and quality that is a requirement in such locations. In addition,
commercial server products are not designed from the ground up to pass NEBS
testing, which may prohibit their use in such applications all together.
Luckily, a new standard has been approved that addresses these concerns, and
its availability is right around the corner.
The Next Big Thing
The most recent and potentially the most significant entry into the open
standards telecom market is called the Advanced Telecom Computing
Architecture, or AdvancedTCA. Like CompactPCI and its derivatives,
AdvancedTCA has been developed with participation by more than 100 companies
under PICMG. AdvancedTCA is based on a modular compute platform built on
multi-vendor interoperable building blocks. These building blocks are
commonly server blades, storage blades, chassis management, and control
transport switching and data transport switching blades.
AdvancedTCA borrows from the idea used in proprietary systems, where
functional elements are abstracted to the blade level and integrated into a
chassis. The main exception, and main point of attraction, is that the
interface to the system, physical form factor, and chassis interconnects
have all been based on open standards. This allows for a multi-vendor
ecosystem to enable blade-level solutions to be integrated into the system,
eliminating dependency on sole source providers. The physical form factor,
power, and cooling have all been increased dramatically, compared to
CompactPCI, allowing the use of state-of-the-art technology, and
accommodating a long roadmap of follow-on technology inside the system.
With AdvancedTCA, it�s now possible to collapse into a single box what has
typically required a complete rack full of equipment. Applications areas
that would benefit include wireline and wireless infrastructure; media,
access, trunking, and telephony gateways; service nodes, echo cancellers;
optical core networking; data center server and storage elements.
The adoption of AdvancedTCA is not limited to the top tier telecom
equipment manufacturers. These vendors, who have large product lines of
disjointed proprietary system-level products today, will benefit by
leveraging a common platform that spans their product lines as well as
reaping greater price productivity due to higher volume purchasing. The
second and third tier of telecom equipment manufacturers will benefit by a
leveling of the playing field. Standards-based equipment eliminates
potential market barriers to entry by allowing products to be mixed in a
competitor�s installed base. Standardized hardware, however, is only part of
the solution.
Application Enabling
The next level of abstraction to be moved into the open standards world is
in the management of the platform. In the past, platform management was done
in proprietary software. This created a legacy software code base that
needed to be ported and brought up to date as new underlying transport
technologies were developed. The development of a standard set of APIs to
manage the underlying implementation is clearly required to maintain
platform portability and minimize application software impact.
This requirement has been recognized and addressed by the Service
Availability Forum (SAF). The SAF specification defines a set of layers
between the customer application and the low-level hardware. Communication
between these layers occurs utilizing a standard set of APIs. This set uses
the concept of a middleware layer that supports availability management,
cluster management, message, event and check pointing services. This
middleware removes the requirement for applications to have direct knowledge
of the underlying hardware. The lower layer provides the interface to the
operating system and hardware. The lower layer facilitates portability of
the middleware across hardware platforms and manufacturers.
The combination of both AdvancedTCA hardware and SAF compliant middleware
is a powerful enabler for telecom equipment manufacturers to concentrate on
their value-added hardware and application software.
Conclusion
Telecom equipment manufacturers that include both standards-based hardware,
as well as software in their products, will be able to provide the next
generation of scalable, cost-effective telecom products. These new products,
leveraging on the economies of scale, and building on the time-to-market
advantage, will allow service providers to roll out timely and competitive
new services and new revenue streams. After all, when traveling between
points A and B, it is better to buy a car and drive it there than to start
by building one from the ground up.
Mike Werning is principal staff engineer at Motorola Computer Group, a
leader in the innovation of intelligent building blocks for standards-based
embedded computing. These building blocks include open-architecture
hardware, rich software, and application-ready platforms that enable
equipment manufacturers to quickly and cost-effectively embed leading-edge
functionality into their next-generation systems. More information can be
found at
www.motorola.com/computer.
If you are interested in purchasing reprints of this article (in either
print or HTML format), please visit Reprint Management Services online at
www.reprintbuyer.com or contact a representative via e-mail at
[email protected]
or by phone at 800-290-5460.
[ Return
To The May 2004 Table Of Contents ]
|