Xpress: What did you test?

OR: We put the TM up for a realistic broadband user and service shaping case featuring hierarchical shaping and buffering. We ran several types of tests to see how the system behaves under stress.

Xpress: What were the test objectives?

OR: Our goal was to utilize every part of advanced TM functionality simultaneously under high traffic load. The tests were designed to validate both the TM hardware and the TM software APIs to handle the high demands on functionality and performance in today’s broadband networks.

Xpress: And what were the results?

OR: Everything went as expected. With no exceptions. So I have only green marks to report in the test report.

Xpress: Is that so? Can you possibly elaborate a bit further?

OR: The results were very conclusive, for every test the TM performed according to its design specification. The results were almost surprisingly perfect with regards to shaper accuracy, buffer depth, scheduling algorithms and WRED drop probabilities. Our test results were nearly indistinguishable from the theoretical models.

Xpress: What was the most challenging test?

OR: That was to simultaneously monitor and measure performance on 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports with 38,400 queues to check throughput rate, buffer depth and traffic prioritization for every single queue. The dynamic nature of traffic management required some tests to run for several hours before final results were reached.

Xpress: Promising results. Any conclusive remarks?

OR: All in all I am happy that we with great confidence can offer such a well-designed integrated Traffic Manager to our customers.

Want to read the full report? Please contact us to get your own issue of the Traffic Manager Test Report.

Xpress: What’s new in Xelerated’s precision time solution?

Tord Haulin: We have added a Precision Time Unit to every Ethernet MAC embedded on the NPU. This is a piece of flexible time stamping and time correction logic, which allows advanced synchronization services. The precision time unit has one-step time stamping capability and offloads the CPU from latency calculation tasks.

Xpress: What is One-step PTP?

TH: One-step PTP is quickly becoming a key requirement for synchronization services to base stations in Carrier Ethernet mobile backhaul networks.  It allows to fully utilize the advantages provided by PTPv2-2008. With one-step time stamping each PTP event packet gets its latency time added ‘on-the-fly’, before the PTP packet is further forwarded to the next node towards the base station. Although this adds to the processing of PTP packets, we have implemented a solution that actually improves the time stamp precision.

Xpress: How precise is the solution?

Johan Bäck: To achieve high accuracy, time stamping has to be done as close to the wire as possible. We have paid close attention to jitter, and even managed to reach nanosecond time stamp accuracy for the higher link speeds. You won’t find anything better than that in the market.

Xpress: What about customers who want to support other PTP profiles, like legacy two-step PTP?

TH: The precision time solution supports PTPv1 and all clock modes in PTPv2-2008.

Xpress: What about Synchronous Ethernet?

TH: Synchronous Ethernet is of course also supported. You can flexibly monitor and select links for locking the frequency of the real time clock embedded on the NPU.

Xpress: Can other applications benefit from the new precision time unit?

JB: Sure.The technology has been developed for superior flexibility. We see One-step PTP as an important use case of course, but having time logic in the MAC increases the overall capability of the network processor. The most obvious area for other usages is OAM and performance monitoring.

Interested to understand more about Xelerated Precision Time Solution? Check out our Precision Time white paper.

Note! PTP is short for Precision Time Protocol. This is an IEEE standard initially developed for the automation industry in mind, but was re-engineered in 2008 to support wide scale carrier deployments. The updated standard is referred to PTP IEEE 1588-2008.

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.

• Programmability. What level of flexibility is required?
• Processing. How many operations and table look-ups per packet? Is wirespeed performance critical?
• Power. What’s the power budget? Can the device bring the right performance per watt?
• Price. Level of integration (embedded memories, traffic management, etc.) has a huge impact on the bill-of-material, which ultimately defines the manufacturing cost and the margin for the target system.

Once coined by Jerome McCarthy and later made famous by Philip Kotler, the right marketing mix for a company can be modelled by another group of Ps: product, price, promotion and place. Kotler later added a couple of other Ps.  Is there anything missing in the ‘four P’ model for packet processing decision making?

While the industry had some debate last year on how to migrate to Ethernet-based backhaul, the transition is likely to be faster and simpler than anyone expected. Because challenges with packet-based synchronization services have been solved with PTP and Synchronous Ethernet, operators can now modernize networks quickly. Once all mobile traffic runs on IP/Ethernet, operators can stop spending on legacy equipment, and further cut operational expenses. According to Michael Howard, more than 100 operators are now deploying ‘a single IP-Ethernet backhaul.’

Infonetics’ findings are in line with what Xelerated sees in the market place. In China for example, the move to Packet Transport Networks (PTN) represents an even more aggressive backhaul investment than seen elsewhere. Here in Sweden, fiber is deployed to cell sites and Ethernet is the transport protocol for all services; they are now in the second phase of the roll-out.

I wonder: Will other markets learn from this model, and if so, what impact will we see on the market figures?

Per Lembre demonstrates 100G

Over four weeks, we are visiting 40 customers and partners to demonstrate our new technology.  Many of them have said this is the first time they have actually experienced a demonstration of wirespeed processing at 100G in a single chip.

Here are some of my reflections this far:

• 100G is hot. With the finalization of the 100GE and 40GE standards, there is a huge interest to scale packet processing to the next level. 100G wirespeed network processors that can match the new step in link capacity will be critical to the commercial success of 100GE.
• Greater port densities in next generation fiber access systems. Xelerated’s OLT and unified fiber access customers are pushing to get the next generation systems to market as soon as possible. Service providers, primarily in Asia, are driving the need for more bandwidth and customized features to fit local market conditions.
• Power reduction is critical. In several meetings, our customers indicated that the HX and AX technology can reduce the power consumption with more than 50% compared to a competitive solutions. This has implications for both the environment and the operational cost of running the networks. Reduction in power consumption also enables new types of designs that are more efficient and require a smaller footprint.
• Wirespeed by Design. We use this term as a tag line for the company.  Through these meetings, I now realize just how well it resonates with our customer base. The dataflow architecture enables wirespeed packet processing without degradation when all services are turned on. It simplifies engineering, and our customers gain time to market. In addition, they are assured the products will come out well in performance tests.

The demo tour marks an important milestone for many of our customer design projects. The huge increase in demand on Reference Design Kits and the intensive customer correspondence on technical requirements are two safe signs of what’s ahead of us. It will be a lot of work, and a lot of fun!

By the way, we invited Craig Matsumoto at Light Reading to see the world’s first 100G demo. It all went very well, as expected, however there was initial confusion about bitrates and packet rates for 100Gbps Ethernet wirespeed. Please refer to the comment section to the blog post for more details.

So what implications will this have on 3G and 4G?  The most obvious is the demand for more bandwidth in the radio access network. It will have to be optimized for carrying data traffic. Voice services must be preserved, but data will dominate. And keep in mind that we are just in the early stages of the mobile data explosion.

Carriers have been trying to patch their networks in different ways to support more aggressive mobile data traffic volumes for some years now. Ethernet and circuit emulation in different variants have been introduced. Ethernet is a more high performance transport technology compared to ATM (AAL2 for voice and AAL5 for data). But carriers need rigorous synchronization schemes over Ethernet to make it work.  And there are other challenges like where to terminate legacy services and where to introduce the Ethernet ports? How can the new transport network comply to existing service provisioning schemes?

If the trends observed by Ericsson are correct, we are heading toward a data optimized radio access infrastructure faster than anyone expected. The Ethernet-based transport in the radio access network is needed to cope with the mobile data explosion. There are different attempts to solve this. We can learn from China Mobile’s PTN requirements which utilizes an Ethernet-based transport with synchronization support based on point-to-point (PTP) Ethernet. These networks are designed for data growth, but continue to support voice. And these requirements are here and now. They are designed for 2G, 3G and beyond.

This year, the energy and activity level at Mobile World Congress has been far better compared to the two previous years’ events. A lot of ideas about sharing networks were shown both by service providers and vendors.  Huawei showcased the largest and widest portfolio and made a big impact with their lifetime cost approach. And NEC’s focus on cloud computing was impressive, expanding its concept to all types of customers/users and putting the operators in the central role.

Another thing that struck me about this year’s show is that there are not many Asian people in attendance. In particular, I did not find many of my Chinese industry colleagues.  This week was the Chinese New Year with the spring festival, which is comparable to having an event during the United States’ Thanks giving holiday.  Even still, there were several Asian companies participating and showing their goods, however few visitors from the region.

While previous Mobile World Congress events have been clogged with small startups trying to attract larger companies for M&A activities, this time it was far more companies aiming at building and growing on their own. Another very healthy sign.

Of course, a more dominant subject here at the show is LTE, however it is being talked about in a very broad context. And few are discussing how to become the most efficient bit-pipe provider (which must be the basis for all MNOs).

Another trend is that OPEX seems to be coming back after years of short-term focus on CAPEX.  And lastly, it is interesting to note that the representatives from the Asian markets air a much more positive vision of the future compared with the “old” world.

Stay tuned for more thoughts from the show floor…