Xelerated Xpress

Ethernet Backhaul Is Here and Now. What’s Next?

New statistics from Infonetics research shows a rapid transition to IP/Ethernet-based mobile backhaul. The momentum towards IP/Ethernet is very strong; 89% of all backhaul spending was on IP/Ethernet equipment in 2010. With a net addition of 1.6 billion mobile broadband subscribers between 2011 and 2015, we can expect continued healthy growth in this market.

The transition towards IP/Ethernet has been foreseen. We are in a catch-up phase to deliver on the strong demand for streaming content down to mobile smartphones and tablets. Mobile TV and video drive bandwidth demand, implicating mobile backhaul infrastructure as well as to content distribution sites. One example is radio streaming providers in the Nordics, that recently had to scale up their bandwidth towards mobile networks as radio is going narrowband. To send a live signal in unicast is not necessarily the most effective distribution method, but the trend towards individual content consumption can’t be held back.

The industry is learning how to engineer the always-on-society. Mobile backhaul is now Ethernet/IP. What is next? There will be a significant portion of ‘more of the same’, but with the many implementation options (microwave vs fiber vs copper, Ethernet vs MPLS, P2P vs MP2MP, PTP vs Synchronous Ethernet vs legacy sync), there is also plenty of room for optimization.

We are just at the beginning of the mobile broadband era, and best practice is still to be defined.

by Per Lembre on Apr. 13th, 2011

Making a Rapid Move to 100GE

The 40GE/100GE standards are ready, but the industry has a long way still to go before we see high volumes. What is holding back adaption? Big content providers like Facebook and Google have been pushing for commercial viable 100GE systems for some time. The Internet backbone players are increasingly challenged to keep up with bandwidth demand. I believe Michael Howard of Infonetics summarized it well at the Ethernet Summit in San Jose recently. As he put it, “Early components are expensive as well as large, power-hungry and hot, and there are still several generations to go in downsizing these parts for more economical systems.“

So, let us look at an example of a 100GE board of today, using in-house designed packet processing silicon:

The line card is packed with silicon to perform packet processing, traffic management and buffering for 100 Gbit/s of traffic. Here is where the new member of the HX family, the HX336 comes into play. The HX336 includes a 100 Gbit/s traffic manager with deep packet buffering in off-chip DRAM. By utilizing the service density of the HX family, the line card above can be optmized to only use two chips for packet processing and traffic management, a pair of HX326 and HX336. The HX336 is used in the egress pass supporting both packet processing and traffic management. The HX326 is responsible for traffic classification and packet processing in the ingress path. Reducing the number of chips for packet processing, traffic management and buffering from four to six to two result in significant power and cost savings. Several of our customers have witnessed a 50% reduction of power consumption.

The new HX336 network processor is Xelerated’s contribution to the industry’s transition to 100GE and optical transport networks OTU4 standard. The transition may not be immediate, but as technologies matures, the shift may be stronger than expected.

by Per Lembre on Apr. 1st, 2011

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Ethernet Backhaul Is Here and Now. What’s Next?

Making a Rapid Move to 100GE

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