The GSMA Mobile World Congress is held every year, and for the past few it has been located in Barcelona, Spain. This city provides an excellent backdrop for the congress with its architecture, art and relaxed lifestyle.

However, more importantly for the cellular telecommunications industry it is the largest congress of the industry being the global showcase for cutting edge technology. With around 50 000 people attending and 1300 companies exhibiting it is the one “must be there” event for the year.

One of the big questions before the event was regarding the effect of the downturn on the industry. The answer seems to be that there have been some effects, but not nearly as much as some had feared. Although some felt that many companies were only sending the top executives to reduce costs, most of the vendors we spoke to said that business was good.

Mobile World Congress keynote addresses

This year there were keynote addresses provided by several leading industry figures: Vittorio Colao, Chief Executive of Vodafone, Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO Google, Tadashi Onodera, President and Chairman of KDDI, Guo Ping, CSO, Huawei and Chairman of Huawei Device and several others.

In his keynote at Mobile World Congress, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt put mobile at the centre of Google´s roadmap for the future. Unveiling Google´s thinking, Schmidt stated that as far as he is concerned,  it is “Mobile First.”

Other CEOs, including those from Vodafone, RIM and Alcatel-Lucent gave upbeat keynotes, saying that the future is bright as we enter this new decade. Seeing the emergence from the recession, Vittorio Colao saw a new era for mobile.

Femtocells at Mobile World Congress

Femto cell technology is one of the major new developments that is seen as providing major benefits for both the user in terms of coverage at home or in the office where signal strengths are normally poor and for the network provider by extending the coverage at little cost. Using the user’s DSL or other high speed Internet link, this provides a low cost backhaul solution.

At MWC 2009, many companies were showing their new developments including some femtocells themselves. This year, many operators are rolling them out. As an example, within the UK, Vodafone, with their Suresignal are finding that demand has exceeded expectations. Also further announcements are expected from the FemtoForum on Tuesday morning regarding further developments.

However the developers are also seeing significant increases in activity. One of the major barriers that was seen was the $100 cost. Ubiquisys have been able to break this barrier with their G3MINI which not only supports the standard femto functions, but also incorporates its real time self organising capability that uses cognitive radio technology so it can operate anywhere at any time without causing interference.

However some have asked about the green situation of femto technology. With huge numbers of femtocells being deployed, will they actually increase the overall power consumption for a network, or will the figures be quietly missed out of the calculations?

3G LTE

3G LTE and the 4G final solution is another big area of interest. Already 3G networks have gone live, but how many handsets are available. With handsets being one of the big holding factors for the original 3G, will the industry fall into the same holes as before. With the standards for 3G LTE all but finalised, progress is on target for the full 4G standard as our discussions with ETSI revealed. Network rollout is also progressing as we mention below. With one already live in Stockholm - being extensively drive tested - development on handsets and dongles is apparently progressing well.

Furthermore developments in the voice capability for LTE have been seen. Originally LTE was seen as an all-packet system, but with many people wanting to see it incorporate a voice capability, the “One-Voice” sytem has been introduced. Called VoLTE (Voice over LTE), this IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) based system now has wide industry support and is being pushed by GSMA and supported by over 40 organisations across the cellualr industry.  The VoLTE approach supports many features including call waitng, call hold, and call barring. Using IMS it also is able easily integrated into the overall IP environment of LTE and 4G and is able to support many featues, while also being able to fall back to the older 2G and 3G systems where necessary.

Also Verizon announced that they will be launching their commercial LTE networks in the USA later this year. They are already in advanced pre-launch testing, and see no problem with making their  LTE commercial launch this year.

Network developments

One area that is increasingly attracting attention is that of network development. Here there are two main areas. One is the improved backhaul and general network performance required for HSPA+ and LTE. The other is the developments that will bring green improvements.

Companies such as Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens and many others are bringing improved networks, but other such as Actix and Celcite, etc are bringing network optimisation software. These offerings bring a number of elements of cell network management together.

Actix were showing how their SON system is able to provide complete network management and optimisation. This is able to operate on 3.9 / 4G networks to provide mnagement of interference, overload, network failures and also management/planning for new sites and networks. With complete integration into the network system, the Actix SON is now being adopted by many large suppliers - they announced a very large contract that has just been signed with NEC.

Celcite also have their COPS system deployed, although mainly in the USA. There are around 25k sites that it covers. In addition to this, they offer a CMOC (Centrallised Manintenance and Optimisation Centre) where they offer a fully managed capability to operators.

The green aspects of network management are also very important these days. Figures indicate that IT as a whole contributes to less than 2% of all CO2 emissions and of this less than 20% comes from telecommunications including cellular telecommunications. It is nevertheless still important to reduce the carbon footprint of cellular networks.

One of the benchmarks used is the level of energy used per subscriber per year. In 1995 the generally accepted figure was 60 - 80 kwhr/subscriber/year. This year, this figure has fallen to between 12 and 20 kwhr/subscriber per year, and with development trends remaining as they are figures of around 3 kwhr/subscriber/year are anticipated by around 2018.

Also there are many developments taking place looking at the opportunities for using alternative energies. Many companies including Ericsson and many others are looking at all the alternatives.

Cellular Test solutions

While testing may be thought of as a necessary evil, it is always required, especially during the development phases of any new technology where it is absolutely necessary. The equipment vendors have a difficult time, because their equipment must be capable of being ahead of the game, so that the new developments can be adequately tested as they are developed. With LTE being drive tested, and LTE advanced being formalised, equipment vendors have their work cut out in developing test equipment that will meet the needs of these new technologies.

Aeroflex demonstarted their end to end test capability for LTE, and announced their fading / AWGN generator capability that can be added as a software upgrade to their 7100 tester.  The 7100 can be used  development and test stages of UE chip sets and terminals and is updated to the new Rel-8 standards. Measurements are provided for characterising the performance of LTE mobile devices, both at the radio interface and the protocol stack - including the PCDP and IMS layers.The 7100 can also be used for end-to-end performance.

In addition to this, Aeroflex was also talking about their well established TM500 UE simulator. This is now a well established item of LTE test equipment that has been widely used in all forms of testing for the LTE infrastructure.  

Other developments

There will be many other areas where developments are taking place - applications, network infrastructure, mobiles and smartphones, and much more are all be represented.

Powermat were showing their novel charging mechanism using an inductive system. Comprising an intelligent source in a special mat, along with a receiver, the system operates at frequencies of the order of a hundred kiloHertz or so. Although special backs may be required in some instances newer variants only require the use of a Powermat battery as a replacement for the original.

Antennas are also of great importance - ensuring that the transmitted power is directed in the right direction, but the picture becomes considerably more complicated when looking at solutions for use inside buildings where signal paths are very variable. Andrew Systems described their advanced antenna technology with TRDUs, (Transmitter Receiver Duplex Units) now having the ability to be installed at the antenna head. With increased reliability and more efficient power amplifiers this is now a reality.

Andrew also they outlined the challenges they see with operators requiring wider bandwidth antennas to cover the wider range of bands, and the greater functionality required with beamsteering now needed in many areas to give increased efficiency in terms of operation. Using their Smart Beam system they can tilt and pan the beam and also alter the beamwidth to minimise interference in neighbouring cells, and effect load sharing between cells.

There are also very small companies who are able to produce real advancements on a variety of platforms. Cinche, (cinche.co.uk) showed a phone with a really smooth GUI. Many small companies such as these are able to produce results comparable with man of the larger companies.

So with all the possibilities for a downturn at Barcelona, the overall feel is upbeat, with many technologies such as LTE and femtocells fast becoming realities and not just hype. The coming 12 months should see some exciting developments ….

Disasters often come along with the destruction of the local telecommunication infrastructure (provided that this infrastructure existed beforehand) causing severe problems for rescue operations. Satellite communications is then the only communication means for the rescue teams.

Today costly satellite telephones with low data rates are used in the early disaster phase (usually several hours after the disaster). In order to quickly restore the local mobile communication networks (GSM or 3G) with higher data rates, more complex satellite communication terminals (up to container size with several hundred kilograms) are available, which connect local base stations via satellite to the core network. Transportation and installation of these satellite terminals take usually up to several days.

TriaGnoSys developed a emergency communication system under the WISECOM (Wireless Infrastructure over Satellite for Emergency Communications) project, co-funded by the European Commission in the 6^th Framework Program. The system is rapidly deployable lightweight, satellite-based communication infrastructure, which can be easily transported by one person and can be installed within minutes. The communication infrastructure consists of small, rapidly deployable, terrestrial base stations (GSM, WLAN), which are connected to the public telephone network and to the Internet via satellite. The system supports voice and data communications for the rescue teams and it also provides a local GSM or 3G communication infrastructure for the victims in the disaster area.

GSM over Inmarsat BGAN

To provide voice and basic data services such as SMS or GPRS, WISECOM considers the use of GSM over BGAN technology to be implemented in the emergency suitecase. The global system architecture is depicted in the picture below: The communication architecture intercepts  the signaling and the data communication between the GSM BTS (Base Transceiver Station) and the BSC (Base Station Controller). The BTS performs encapsulation of GSM packets (signaling and data) into IP packets. The GSM packets are later recovered by the NSGS (Network Side GSM Server), forwarded to the BSC, and switched to the core network elements. The TSGS is basically a ruggedized industrial computer running TriaGnoSys’ Mobile GSM Infrastructure (TRIAMOGIS) software which performs the following functions:

• Satellite bandwidth on demand: the software requests dynamically the required bandwidth in the satellite modem, and when there is no more resource available, the incoming call will be blocked.
• BSC signaling suppression: TSGS and NSGS suppress most GSM signaling messages which are sent periodically to minimize the satellite usage and required bandwidth.
• Codec selection and IP compression: To efficiently utilize the scarce satellite resource, the TSGS supports different types of voice codecs to reduce the size of the voice packets. Both GSM full-rate and Adaptive Multirate narrow band (AMR-NB) with rate as low as 4.75 kbps are supported. Further decrease in the transmission bit rate is achieved by robust IP/UDP/RTP header compression.

Other functions such as Quality of Service (QoS) support, GSM BTS automatic control functions, GSM service selection, and network management are also supported. The chosen technology for the BTS is ip.access nanoBTS. It provides coverage of approximately 350 meters with full power in open space. Due to its small size, the BTS can be carried and deployed anywhere, providing GSM coverage to practically any place on earth, as long as there is satellite connectivity.

GSM over BGAN System Architecture

The satellite to be used is the Inmarsat BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network) technology. BGAN provides data and voice services globally via its 3 satellites. There exist different types of terminal to access the satellites. The Thrane & Thrane Explorer 300 and Explorer 500 are the ones found to have reasonable trade-off between performance and dimension (size and weight). The small size of the satellite terminal limits the maximum data rates that can be achieved in the satellite link. The usage of the scarce bandwidth resource is managed through the usage of traffic classes. There are two types of class that could be opened for data communication: streaming and background class.  The streaming class gets higher priority and ensures that constant data rate is available to the user.

The Explorer 500 terminal is capable of providing streaming class connections up to 128 kbps. Users are charged based on the time spent on the connection. The rest of the satellite channel capacity is assigned to the background class. Here the available bit rate may vary, and the user is charged based on the volume of data transferred on the satellite link. The three main components of the WAT are: the GSM base station, the industrial PC, and the satellite modem. The three components only weigh approximately 5 kg.

Provision of Data Services via WiFi

A general overview of the WiFi over BGAN system architecture developed in the framework of the WISECOM project can be seen below. The architecture is composed of the WISECOM Access Terminal (WAT), encompassing mainly the WiFi router (Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT firmware), the WISECOM client and the BGAN terminal. At the interface between the WISECOM client (WC) and the BGAN terminal, several virtual interfaces (potentially using the same physical interface), can be supported for data transmission. These virtual interfaces will be associated with IP tunnels carrying IP datagrams from the WAT to the Control Center in the disaster-safe segment, or directly to the public IP networks.

Authentication and authorization of users is done via a RADIUS server. It provides the rescue team members having specific credentials (username, password) with unlimited access to all IP services, and limits access by all other authenticated users only to HTTP service, including a specific web page giving all information relevant to the ongoing disaster. The WISECOM client also supports traffic management and prioritization thanks to built-in tools (Linux tc command) performing traffic classification, traffic shaping, and implementing different queuing, dropping, and scheduling strategies In addition, the WC performs cache and proxy for optimal use of the limited satellite link bandwidth, dynamically manages the satellite connection (using the satellite modem’s AT commands) according to the amount of traffic to carry over the satellite link, supports different HTTP proxy servers managing the WISECOM emergency web page, accessed by default by the different users in the WiFi public domain and prior to login, the database of users allowed to connect to the system, and the state of the VoIP connections running over the system. Finally, VoIP functionalities like voice over IP calls, voicemail, and voice conference are provided using Asterisk VoIP server.

Integration of GSM and WiFi into the WAT

A key factor is the integration of the GSM and WiFi component in a robust deployment suite. The GSM and the WiFi module each has its own mechanism to guarantee QoS, namely via the TRIAMOGIS software in the GSM part, and via internal Linux tool in the WiFi part. The WiFi traffic management tool may alter the way the traffic is routed between the GSM base station and the satellite modem. However this should not produce much impact as long as the highest priority is still given to the GSM traffic.  The following figure shows the assembly of the emergency suitcase.

Satellite terminal

Markus Werner, Axel Jahn are Managing Directors of TriaGnoSys GmbH, Argelsrieder Feld 22, 82234 Wessling, Germany, http://www.triagnosys.com  tel: +49 (0) 8153 88678-0

The importance of NFC is growing rapidly. Its importance is beginning to be felt in many areas of the electronics industry as it is being taken up by some of the major players. Not only is it being used as an easier form of technology to use in payment cards and ticketing, but it is also being incorporated into many mobile phones to provide a variety of functions which are only limited by the imagination of the development engineers. NFC technology offers a niche within the variety of RF based technologies that are available today. With inherent security defined by the short ranges over which it will operate, NFC is able to offer effortless technology. There are none of the difficulties of association of stations that are commonplace with longer range technologies where many additional security issues are required.

WIMA Conference

In view of the importance of NFC, the WIMA 2009 conference and forum was held in Monaco. Located on the southern French cost of the Cote d’Azur, the location provided an excellent backdrop for the conference with its Sun, hotels and highlife. Even the Casino was not far away!

The Casino at Monte Carlo, Monaco

However, the conference itself was more down to earth. It provided an excellent showcase for the world of NFC and contactless communications. With WIMA, a member of the NFC forum, the event provided an authoritative view for the latest NFC technology developments along with the latest applications. Now well established, significant opportunities being seen for the use of NFC in many areas and as a result the technology is moving forward and significant progress was seen since last year. This year’s event proved to be very successful according to the organisers.

Grimaldi Forum, where the WIMA NFC Conference was held

Numbers showed an increase over the previous year despite the hard economic conditions. There was an increase of around 20% in the number of companies exhibiting. The number represented at WIMA represents a significant proportion of the NFC community, both members and non-members of the NFC forum. Not only were there some of the large players such as Nokia, NXP and Sony, but in addition to this, any smaller enterprises had stands alongside them, allowing large and small to be together under one roof. WIMA also saw an increase in the number of delegates attending, with more people from a wider area than in previous years.

NFC products

With many suppliers, developers and manufacturers of NFC equipment and products exhibiting at WIMA, it will be possible to see the latest technologies that have been developed. It is anticipated that it is will be possible to see the latest technology trends and as a result see what is likely to be hitting the market place in the months and years to come. Nokia chose WIMA to announce their new 6216 NFC phone. In their press release, Nokia said that this is amongst the first commercial devices using the SIM card to enable secure transactions using NFC. The phone uses the SIM card to securely hold the users credit card information, thereby allowing credit card transactions to be made using easy NFC contactless technology and the phone to hold the details. To achieve this an NFC compatible SIM card is required. Nokia also stated that they would now be providing the option for NFC in all new products. However for NFC to really take off more manufacturers need to provide NFC phones and products. Most of the major players in the mobile industry are members. Motorola, and Sony Ericsson, for example are members, but were not in evidence at the show.

NFC applications

There are many applications associated with NFC. Many of these applications will fit into existing products, to enable greater levels of functionality to be achieved. It is anticipated that new NFC applications will be showcased at WIMA. These various applications will show much of the thinking behind the way NFC will be used in the future. In some of the presentations, applications for NFC assisted social networking have been described; Another outlined an m-Wallet where payments could be made via a number of means with a single mobile phone, which if lost it would only be necessary to report its loss to a single point of contact rather than a variety of card companies, thereby rolling in the insurance aspect provided by many banks or insurance companies these days. Another application being researched at Antwerp University College looked at mapping and location based services using NFC. By using NFC tags placed at strategic places around a city, it is easy for people to discover their location, or automatically report to friends where they are so they can meet. This is more accurate than GPS because it works in buildings (which GPS does not), and could be used to indicate whether people are in a particular office, bar, etc. All that is needed is a quick swipe of the phone over an NFC tag.

NFC standards testing

One area which is of importance to many is that of NFC testing. This is the key to being able to deploy products from a variety of vendors with the guarantee that they will work “out in the field”. There are two methods by which this may be achieved:

• Conformance testing whereby the item is tested to a specification.
• Interoperability testing where the product is tested against a number of other products to ensure interoperability.

In one of her addresses, Paula Berger stated that the NFC Forum was moving toward adopting a conformance approach, although they would be running some “Plugfests” for manufacturers to ensure that their products worked with other devices on the market. Only by gaining consumer confidence will the success of NFC be assured. If it is difficult to make work or there are problems with its operation, then take-up will be impeded as the Bluetooth SIG found in the early days of Bluetooth. The NFC Forum are keen to ensure this does not happen.

Security

Security is an issue of major concern. With NFC being aimed mainly at ticketing and payments, there is plenty of scope for hackers and others with the will to break through the security that is being built in to the NFC equipments. For many, the fact that the range of NFC is limited to a few centimetres provides a significant level of inherent security. In addition to this many NFC transactions are limited to low values without the use of a PIN, and many people seem to want the freedom of ease of making low value transactions without the need for entering PINs - take the example of a swiping a card for a single train journey. However for higher value transactions would require a PIN. Nevertheless security remains a major issue. While there are many inbuilt security features built into NFC, Forum representatives indicated that the final levels of security would have to be implemented by the application developers.

WIMA Awards

As part of WIMA, there was a competition for SMEs to show their NFC developments. As these developments came from start up companies and small research outfits, the aim was that they would provide some particularly innovative NFC solutions. The awards ceremony was held on the evening of 23rd April, and true to form there were many very interesting applications for NFC. Two tracks were judged.

The first was a Commercial Track for the “Best NFC Service of 2009.There was also a second track, Research Track for the “Most Innovative NFC Research Project of 2009″. The winners were selected from 20 finalists who exhibited at WIMA. These were shortlisted from a total of 52 entries from 21 countries.

The winner of the Commercial Track was entitled: “Interactive Alerts for Childhood Pneumonia” by Interactive Research and Development of Pakistan. This solution was developed to use NFC to provide patient tracking for healthcare in 3rd world countries where patient identities are difficult to track they have no health service numbers, etc. Children, especially, were fitted with an NFC bracelet. This contained their identity number and it could then be used to feed back information on statistics of diseases, but more importantly for them, it enabled accurate tracking of blood samples etc so that the right person could be treated for the right disease.

The winner of the Research Track was VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. They developed an NFC based social media service called “Hot in the City” that used NFC enabled phones as a friend connection platform in conjunction with Facebook.

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The exhibition area of the WIMA NF conference inside the Grimaldi Forum.

What to expect

It is difficult to see exactly how much progress will be made over the coming year. The current financial crisis will obviously have an impact, but the main problem is the typical “Chicken and Egg” scenario. The scheme will need to gain a critical mass to take off. While Nokia has taken the technology on board, other phone manufacturers do not have the same commitment. Nevertheless a number of large ticketing applications use NFC, including the Oyster card used for travel in London. So will it take off? That’s the billion dollar question. If I were to put money on it, then I would say “Yes”, but I don’t think it will be as big as the NFC Forum might like to think. 

Wireless access is quickly becoming an essential function of the enterprise network.  With the arrival of 802.11n and its capacity of hundreds of megabits per access point, the value of wireless access has increased dramatically and the wireless domain is now able to extend to new applications beyond laptops – such as VoIP handsets, dual-mode smartphones, and desktop PCs – delivering a far more capable network with full mobility.  As enterprises become more reliant on the wireless domain for delivery of mission-critical applications, network administrators will need to determine how to distribute this capacity without reducing network efficiency or straining their budgets.

Initial enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) deployments have offered, at best, modest bandwidth and poor security that has significantly hindered wireless usage in the enterprise.  As a result, deployment has been limited to a small set of critical applications.  In this scenario, IT professionals were using an overlaid architecture as a minimally-disruptive way to quickly graft WLANs onto their existing wired networks.  With this approach, all WLAN traffic is tunneled to a centralized access controller where it is de-encapsulated and authenticated before entering the wired network.

Traditional wireless access implemented using an overlay approach that tunnels all WLAN traffic to a centralized access controller where it can be de-encapsulated and authenticated before entering the wired network. Increasing activity results in traffic consuming a greater percentage of backbone bandwidth with increased latency and congestion.

While 802.11n improves wireless performance, the overlay approach suffers from a network bottleneck due to inefficiencies, and it also treats wireless operations as a special service running over the network rather than being implemented as an essential, inherent feature.  This leads to inefficiencies that prevent cost-effective scaling as the user base for wireless services increases.  Network administrators contemplating the migration to 802.11n need to ask whether a new network architecture will be required to realize all the benefits enabled by wireless access.  This article outlines the need for a new architecture, and reviews the characteristics and benefits of a solution based upon a new building block: the unified wireless/wireline switch.

Making the Case for a Unified Wireless Switch Topology

As WLAN traffic increases, a centralized approach multiplies the amount of loading on the network to the point that the functionality of the network is compromised for all the traffic it supports.  The areas most affected include:

• Cost: Bandwidth increases in cost the closer it is to the core.
• Scalability: New controllers must be deployed in a linear relationship to the number of access points supported.  This centralized approach cannot scale to 802.11n data rates without negatively impacting the network as a whole.
• Performance: Network latency and congestion packet loss increases.
• Security: As access points are added, security requirements become more difficult to meet cost-effectively.
• Resiliency: Centralized control creates a single point of failure.

The pervasive, high bandwidth wireless enterprise demands a new unified wireless/wireline architecture that eliminates the bottlenecks and inefficiencies that arise from centralized control.  Instead of handling wireless traffic as an exception, a unified network integrates wireless with traditional wired LAN services to provide a seamless interface between the two.

Specifically, wireless data and management is moved from the core of the network to the network edge by terminating secure tunnels at the edge switches instead of at the access controllers in the core.  Rather than routing wireless traffic to the core and back to the edge, backbone bandwidth is conserved by terminating traffic at the edge and routing traffic directly to its destination.  In addition, security processing is moved to the edge, guaranteeing optimal performance that scales to meet user demands while maintaining network resiliency.

The unified wireless switch topology eliminates tunneling bottlenecks and the inefficiencies that arise from centralized control by integrating wireless traffic with wired LAN services at the edge.

New Enabling Technologies Required

The move to a unified wireless switch topology is an expected evolutionary step for wireless, as emerging network technologies are commonly introduced in the core and moved to the edge as they mature.  To enable the unified wireless switch network, several new technologies will be required.  Leaders in the networking industry have already begun development of these technologies, with silicon and software for both switches and wireless access points expected to be ready well before large scale 802.11n deployments.  The key enabling technologies include:

• Open, Hardware-based Encapsulation: Rather than continue with the proprietary encapsulation technologies used to backhaul wireless traffic today, the unified network will utilize new open standards such as the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF’s) control and provisioning wireless access point (CAPWAP) specification that securely communicates between switches and access points.  To realize the performance and cost benefits of 802.11n, the encapsulation/de-encapsulation and switching functions should be integrated with the switch silicon.
• Fragmentation and Reassembly: Encapsulation headers can increase packet size beyond Ethernet’s 1518-byte limit.  In this instance, CAPWAP support for fragmentation and reassembly of packets solves the problem of buffering fragments without undue latency with an elegant two-fragment limit, therefore facilitating efficient silicon implementations.
• Distributed Access Point Management: With a centralized network, a single controller could manage anywhere between ten and hundreds of access points.  In a unified network, each access point may be managed by a different edge switch.  Therefore, switch clustering software will be required to form self-organizing, configuration-aware unified switches.  Access rights and policy databases also need to be propagated and managed by each unified switch.

Reaping the Benefits of the Unified Wireless Network

The unified wireless network enables many capabilities beyond reducing installation and operational expenses that bring substantial value to the enterprise.  Some of the benefits network administrators and users will experience include:

• Significantly improved scalability: Appropriate security capacity is introduced with each increase in bandwidth, for each access point deployed, supporting a more aligned, pay-as-you-grow investment outlay when compared to centralized wireless controllers.
• Simplified network management: Using a homogeneous topology will enable network administrators to view access points and switches from a single management point rather than a series of distinct wired and wireless devices. 
• Substantially improved performance: Standardization enables wireless tunneling and other features to be implemented in silicon rather than software.
• Automated management: Features such as auto-configuration and dynamic radio management can be better managed on a per-device basis when compared to centralized implementations.
• Faster authentication: Moving client and policy enforcement to the edge increases responsiveness by reducing turnaround time.
• More efficient bandwidth utilization: Reducing the load over the network backbone will result in increased performance throughout the network. 
• Reduced Latency: Users will also experience reduced latency, as well as increased network resiliency, as switching will occur at the edge versus backhauling all wireless traffic to the core and back to the edge again. 

Future for Unified Wireless LAN Topology

Wireless services are becoming an every day, critical need for businesses, and as such, high bandwidth wireless access must be an integrated part of the enterprise network.  With a unified wireless network, all of the performance, scalability and expense benefits of the traditional network are now available to support wireless traffic.  Without this unification, backhauling and scaling limitations will prove cost-prohibitive while restricting the outstanding potential of high bandwidth enterprise WLANs.

The Mobile World Congress, MWC, combines the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry with a congress providing keynote and industry addresses, as well as bringing together prominent leaders and personalities from mobile operators and equipment vendors, as well as Internet and entertainment professionals. Despite the downturn, the Mobile World Congress 2009 is expected to attract more than 50,000 attendees, and this is giving the best opportunity to see what is happening in the mobile telecommunications industry over the next few years.

It has been quoted that there are now more mobile phones on the world than there are wrist watches, a measure of the size of the cellular telecoms business worldwide, and despite the downturn many of the large cellular companies are throwing money at the Congress. While there is always plenty of hype for the congresss, there are always main undelying themes and trends which soon become obvious. In recent years applications such as mobile video along with increased speeds from HSPA have been prominent.

This year the main themes have revolved around some of the fundamentals for the industry. The evolution from standard 3G and HSPA to LTE as the next world standard, and the promise of LTE Advanced as the 4G technology. Femotocells have also been a major impetus. However not reaching the headlines to the same extent but equally important is the backhaul technologies and systems. In addition to these main themes there have also been many other important technologies being shown. Green base station technologies along with network optimisation are but two. There have also been many applications to enable the operators to gain their revenue as well. All these have been on show, with their proponents being exceedingly committed to their developments and products.

LTE

Mobile broadband is one area where operators are expecting to see considerable levels of growth. However churn is seen as a key problem with many subscribers dissatisfied with the speed, problems with the reliability of the connectivity or just the expense. But despite this many users are looking to mobile connectivity as their many form of broadband connection for the future.

With 3G HSPA now well established the industry is looking to the next steps in terms of mobile broadband, and 3G LTE will be this step. With some trial deployments and more expected soon, this technology has certainly been big at MWC. Offerings range from infrastructure to test equipment and antennas to base stations. One of the major setbacks was announcements by Vodafone, France Telecom and Deustch Telekom that they will delay their 4G deployments (adding some confusion as to what they exactly meant), but others are accelerating their 3.9G LTE deployments. In particular many cdma2000 deployments are looking to LTE as their evolution rather than UMB (ultra mobile broadband using cdma2000 technology) which will not now be supported by Qualcomm. [As an interesting aside, ZTE were still showcasing some UMB products].

As a result many manufacturers are pressing ahead with developments. The standards for LTE were frozen in December 2008, giving manufacturers a stable platform against which they can develop their equipment. Also the conformance test cases and standards are well under way and this will allow formal testing to start. Some trial networks are already being deployed and it is anticipated that the first trial devices will be available in the summer of 2009, with certified devices appearing around 4th quarter 2010. LTE is seen as a key deployment by many operators. In many areas the 3G networks consist of less than 30% HSPA compatible hardware.

As a result the leap directly to LTE from the vanilla 3G hardware appears more attractive than the more gradual and higher cost migration via HSPA. This is proving to be a major driver for the development of LTE networks. However one of the main problems for equipment vendors is not the base stations but the “user equipments” or UEs. These may be traditional handsets of dongles, etc. In order to be able to provide a viable service they need to be multistandard (LTE, HSPA, standard 3G and may be even EDGE) to make use of the available coverage. With spectrum not yet agreed for LTE and likely to be fragmented, this makes the development of roaming capable handsets particularly difficult. As a result this is introducing delays into the development of real rather than evaluation UEs.

Mobile backhaul

When talking about cellular telecommunications technology, most people focus on the phones with their applications and the air interface. However there is a lot of equally important technology within the core network. With the levels of data transfer rising all the time with increasing speeds and numbers of people using applications such as mobile internet, the backhaul technologies need to be able to keep pace with these. Currently around 55% of the base-station backhaul uses microwave links, although the exact levels depend upon country and operator. As with any backhaul solution, the key drivers are cost and capability (i.e. more bandwidth, throughput and efficiency). However it is not just the headline specification that is required, it is an ability to meet the real requirements.

Harris-Stratex provide complete solutions which enable operators to migrate from their existing network solutions which are typically TDM based to the more effective IP based technologies. While the technology to achieve this may be more difficult to develop, it enables the operators to achieve their migration as easily as possible. Said Paul Kennard of Harris-Stratex: ” … providing a market leading dollar-per-Megahertz solution, while also providing a simple low risk and incremental migration path to IP.”

Femtocells

Femtocell technology is another key area that will be important to watch. With 3G coverage typically poor inside buildings, the idea of deploying small femtocells is seen as a key element in improving performance (especially data) and coverage with minimum cost to the operators while also giving significant advantages to users. This year there was a special femtozone at MWC where all those companies associated with femtocell technology can be present. Here a variety of companies will be showcasing their femtocell solutions, along with a strong presence from the Femto Forum itself. In addition to this there are very many other companies exhibiting at MWC supplying everything from hardware to software, and applications to core network software. Many large vendors are showing their femto capabilities.

NEC, for example are a major system integrator who already have two contracts signed for the deployment of femto technology. Using key elements from Kineto Wireless, they are in a pole position to be able to become a major player in this technology. At last year´s MWC there was plenty of talk about femto technology, this year deployments are begining to happen. Key technical challenges include the stability (with no dropped calls), plug and play set-up (to allow easy in-home installation), and interference resilience (to allow femto-cells to operate on a single carrier, etc). Cost is also a major issue. While for enterprise systems providing an inbuilding capability for companies, cost is not such an issue, for home installation the aim is US$100. This is a major challenge for companies like NEC, but with two competing chip vendors (pico-chip and Percello) the chance of meeting the cost challenges are more realistic.

Several of the femtocell manufacturers have been showing their products. One of the leading manufacturers, Ubiquisys has demonstrated the amazing flexibility theirs can offer. In what can be termed the first domestic, and possibly the first commerical use of cognitive radio, these femtocells look at the radio environment around them and set themselves up accordingly. They obviously need to conform to the requirements of the network and regulatory environment in which they operate and if this changes then it can be accommodated by simply downloading new software over the same DSL or other link used to connect to the core network. While the technology elements have been addressed, so too have the costs which are mainly issues of scale. It is anticipated that these will be within reach of targets very soon, and this will enable volumes to increase further and costs to fall further. Not only this, but the Ubiquisys offers look very attractive - while being in keeping with a modern environment, the styling is not overdone, and the small femtocells will fit in with virtually all domestic environments.

The Femto Forum has been at the centre of the work for femto development. It has been no mean achievement to bring the operators together and enable the standards to be agreed. They have been looking at all elements from the technical aspects through to the business cases. As with any mobile telecommunications development, the business case is key, and for femtocells it appears to be a well proven case, and one that should certainly succeed. For the future? Well LTE will be the next hurdle, and work is already under way. LTE femtocells will be in Release 9 of the 3GPP specifications, so we should seem the standards settling at the end of 2009.

WiMAX

In many ways WiMAX has dropped from some of the headlines. Although some say that it may only be used in Africa, it is now a mature technology and it is starting to be used all around the globe. Many devices and chipsets have been certified for multiple frequencies and bandwidths. Although the progress has not been quite as fast as hoped, most profiles are now available. The ongoing committment to WiMAX was demonstrated by the number of people showcasing products.

Aeroflex, for example have their conformance system now certified for 2.3 GHz (for Korea), 2.5 GHz (for North America), and 3.5 GHz (for Europe) and a number of other equipment manufacturers were had many products in evidence. A variety of operators are now pushing the services, with Clearweater in the USA and UK Broadband in the UK leading the way.

However WiMAX is still seen by many as a technology that cannot compete with LTE for political and not technical reasons. While there will be many services in Europe and North America they will need to offer something cable, DSL, and LTE cannot offer. For the areas where existing technologies are not present, then WiMAX is a winner, and is an ideal solution. Africa, and many other areas where no terrestrial infrastructure is present present an ideal opportunity for which WiMAX is ideally suited.

Mobile Phones

Obviously another major element of the mobile phone industry is the developments of the mobile phones. With the background of the number of mobile phones being sold this year expected to drop, fewer new phones were seen hitting the headlines.

Despite this the overall trend for mobile phones is to increase their functionality.  A few years ago phones were just used to talk. Now they are used as full communications devices with many containing the processing power of a computer. The Blackberry from Research in Motion has now become a defacto standard for business with many other manufacturers following similar lines or using similar levels of processing power to address a different area of the market such as imaging, music, etc..

Samsung for example showcased their touch enabled phones under the headline of a “Mobile to touch Everylifestyle”. They also said that they have the largest screen of any mobile manufacturer and the only phone able to record HD video. Interestingly they also entered the “Green” market with their “Blue Planet” initiative - blue because the Earth looks blue from outer space. Later in 2009, they will launch a phone that can be charged using solar energy and will be made from re-cycled plastic.

Mororola have also introduced a number of new phones, with the several of the major offerings aimed at niche markets. Their top of the range Aura is claimed to be the World´s first circular phone, opening using a turning action rather than sliding the two halves up and down. It is also available in a diamond studded version for those with even more to spend!! Then for those who want a tough phone, the “Terrain” is aimed at those on constructions sites and for the miltary. In line with many other manaufacturers a green phone was also on show. The W233 is the first totally carbon neutral phone, whose case is made from recycled plastic. Nokia, Sony Ericsson and others were also showing their ranges of phones.

Other applications

One area where there could be a considerable level of interest is within the green elements of the industry. A Swedish company named Flexenclosure is showcasing its solar powered and wind powered base stations. With mobile operators forecasting a worldwide deployment of over 120 000 base stations in off-grid areas where diesel driven generators may be required, a huge saving can be made by powering these stations from renewable energy sources. The power used by these base stations equates to the traffic within London, so the savings could have a real impact on the environment as well as providing cost savings.

Another interesting development was being shown by Synaptics. This company has around 65% of the world touch pad market on laptops. At MWC they were showing their innovative touch screen technology for mobile phones including those used in some of the new Samsung phones. Using a capacitive technology rather than a resistive one, it is not only very flexible in its mode of operation being able to detect hand gestures as well touches, but it is also very reliable. The touch screen technology can be used on glass or PET (poly-ethylene-teraphthalate). Of the two the plastic is cheaper, but the glass gives a very and clear image, although both seemed very good. These designs are generally custom, and this allows them to be integrated into a variety of devices, including the variety of mobile phones being shown at MWC.

It is interesting to see the many different technologies that have been seen as market winners over the years. Many have disappeared without trace, and particuarly those where the technology, rather than the market have driven the development. However one interesting technology that seems to have found a niche and been market driven rather than technology driven is UMTS TDD. IPWireless have taken their UMTS TDD technology using unused spectrum that is already allocated to many operators. Using this they are introducing mobile television services which seem to be suceeding where DVB-H like its competitor DMB seem to be sinking into the noise. The secret of success is to use a low cost achievable route to introduce technology and applications. It can be a relatively simple upgrade to incorporate UMTS TDD capabilities, including broadcast rather than having to deploy a complete network of DVB-H broadcast stations.

One interesting development was shown by a company named Actix. They offer network optimisation software. With operators spending millions on setting up, maintaining and developing networks it is essential to ensure that the investment is operating to its maximum efficiency. This is not easy as networks are particularly complicated. Actix showed how their new enterprise system can ensure optimum operation and even help damage limiation when faults occur. While many of the larger companies such as NokiaSiemens networks Huawei and others can offer solutions, Actix claim theirs is more vendor independent - an important issue when networks are normally assembled over time using equipment from a variety of suppliers.

Industry Status

However one of the major questions that everyone is asking is how the downturn is affecting the mobile telecommunications industry. Already some casualities have been seen. Canada’s Nortel has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and it is likely that others may follow. While there is always plenty of buzz and hype at MWC, many companies still appear optimistic, although recognising that times are hard in the market place. Many are pinning their hopes on their particualr niche in the market or on the development of LTE. Only time will tell how many of the mobile phone industry suppliers large and small will find it difficult, but for the moment, they all appear to be confident.

With Mobile World Congress 2009 now over, it will be very interesting to see how this year pans out. Trading conditions are now very tough and will continue to be so for some time yet. There was some very good technology on view, and within the current situation only the applications and technologies with sound business cases will survive. In previous years many good ideas have been seen, only to fade. Thise that ahve succeeded have had sound business cases, both in terms of those deploying them but also those that meet a real market need. As someone said the three main ingredients for a good product are sound business case sound business case and a sound business case. That surely must be the overriding moto for this year.

The mobile world is buzzing about femtocells.  The concept of a small, low-cost, customer-deployable home cellular base station that leverages a subscriber’s existing broadband connection for backhaul is an incredibly compelling proposition for mobile operators.  Femtocells hold the promise of reducing churn by improving indoor coverage, saving costs by offloading the macro radio network, and generating additional revenue by offering new ‘Home Zone’ services. However, as the initial femtocell trials are now concluding, and results are being feed back into the market, it’s clear there are a number of technical, standards, business case and regulatory challenges that still need to be addressed before femtocells can really take off in the consumer market.  There is now an opportunity to step back and consider the question, “what are the requirements and capabilities that make the ‘perfect’ femtocell?”

The ‘Perfect’ Femtocell

There are several key points that need to be incorporated into any femtocell design.

• Very Low Cost:  To justify the femtocell business case, most operators are demanding that vendors keep the cost of the device well below €100 and target the €40 to €50 range.  In addition, in a perfect world, operators would not even need to provide all subscribers with a new access point for them to receive a Home Zone service.  Ideally, existing home broadband routers would already incorporate femtocell capability, or subscribers would have already purchased and installed a femtocell for other reasons, like home network connectivity.  Any installed base would dramatically reduce an operator’s financial and logistical burden of populating the network with new customer premise equipment (CPE), and would immediately improve the business case.
• No Macro Network Interference:  The macro radio network is a finely tuned mesh of cell towers designed to maximize connectivity and minimize interference.  The ‘perfect’ femtocell could be added into this mix and not have any detrimental effects on the performance of the macro network.  In addition, it would not cause any detrimental effects to mobile customers who are not femtocell users but come within range of a femtocell.  For example, if you and your neighbor receive service from the same operator and you have a femtocell, the femtocell should not interfere with your neighbor’s handset.
• Future-Proof Radio:  The perfect femtocell would not have to be replaced as the macro network evolves to include the next radio network technology. Cellular radio technology is constantly evolving, and operators are continually upgrading their macro networks.  In the last five to 10 years, many operators have evolved their macro networks from GSM to GSM+GPRS to GSM+EDGE to UMTS to UMTS+HSDPA to UMTS+HSD/UPA.  Soon, they’ll evolve to HSPA+ and LTE.  In addition, the perfect femtocell would be able to support handsets no matter what macro radio technology they used (e.g., GSM/EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA, or even HSPA+ and LTE in the future).
• Predictable Indoor Coverage:  The perfect femtocell would enable operators to provide a predictable wireless coverage range within a home.  That coverage range should not fluctuate based on how near or far a subscriber may happen to live from a macro cell tower.  For marketing reasons, it is imperative that operators are able to accurately set subscribers’ expectations for the service.
• Access Point Mobility:  People move, and the perfect femtocell would be able to move with them- no matter where in the world they may go. 
• Enable Local Internet Offload:  One of the biggest selling points for femtocells is their ability to offload rapidly growing mobile data traffic (think iPhone) from the macro network.  However, the vast majority of that data is standard Internet traffic, not operator-specific mobile data services.  As a result, the perfect femtocell would allow mobile operators to let Internet-related traffic route directly to the Internet and bypass their core data network.
• Facilitate Connected Home Services: In-home networking is an important trend for consumers.  Traditionally, mobile phones have been completely excluded from the ‘connected home’ because they maintained a direct cellular connection to the mobile network.  The perfect femtocell would overcome this limitation and enable mobile phones to communicate directly with other devices in the home.
• Add Value to Other Consumer Electronics in the Home:  The perfect femtocell would add value to other devices in the home; not just mobile handsets.  It would work with any and all devices in the home or office that require wireless connectivity. 

What about Wi-Fi Access Points?

Now, reviewing the list above, there seems to be a glaring omission to this discussion.  What about Wi-Fi access points?  Wi-Fi access points alone may not meet the requirements for the perfect femtocell, but when used in conjunction with 3GPP UMA/GAN technology, the situation would seem to change   By enabling all mobile services to be extended over Wi-Fi to dual-mode handsets, the 3GPP UMA/GAN standard can effectively turn any Wi-Fi access point into a femtocell.  In fact, with UMA/GAN, Wi-Fi access points can become the “new, perfect” femtocells. Let’s think about how that works:

What’s Perfect?

So, will the ‘perfect’ femtocell at the right price with the right features appear anytime soon? Are Wi-Fi access points with UMA/GAN technology actually a ‘perfect’ femtocell already available and widely used around the world?  There is certainly a lot of debate from vendors and operators alike.  Regardless of the technology choice, it’s clear that delivering a home zone service is a priority for mobile operators.  The ‘perfect’ solution is poised to capitalize on this pent-up demand.

Steve Shaw is VP of market development and chief evangelist for UMA/GAN technology at Kineto and is a thought-leader on FMC strategy and market development for femtocells and dual-mode/Wi-Fi services.  He has over 16 years of experience in product and business development roles with telecommunications companies.  Steve holds a bachelor of science in computer science from the University of Southern California.

The promise of Linux that is robust enough to be used in telecoms networks has been a long time coming, but the fourth generation of specifications for Carrier Grade Linux is now becoming well-established.

The future is always an exciting place. Remember the “Star Trek” series, when the crew used communication systems or badges for translation, authentication and subspace links? Back on Earth, cell phones, PDAs and PCs continue to evolve toward those fictional devices, but users have the same expectations of features, availability, reliability, scalability and cost. We rely on communication networks made up of access points, aggregation and core devices plus servers for providing services and connecting end devices.

The more users or calls a network carries, the less downtime is acceptable to the user or the network operator, and this has been a challenge for equipment suppliers. Five nines (99.999%) of uptime per year is a common requirement, with six nines (99.9999%) being requested for core components. Telecoms equipment has to be built with this as a requirement, and previously proprietary hardware and software was used to achieve the five nines reliability. After that, designs were based on standardised CompactPCI hardware but still ran in-house-developed systems and application software. But the development costs were too high for the low margins needed in today’s business. “This approach also did not keep up with the growing demand for new services such as voice and video over IP, higher bandwidth (Gigabits/second) and lower investment costs, nor was it flexible enough to use new technologies such as multi-core CPUs and virtualization quickly and easily - and therefore provided the stage for a new set of open platforms using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and open systems software.”

A New Approach

The PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) released the first Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA, ATCA) Base R1.0 specification in 2002, and at the same time the Carrier -Grade Linux (CGL) working group of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) published its CGL Requirements Definition Documents V1.1. This combination eventually became the great white hope for carrier-class equipment.”

After six years of hype and disappointment, the market for carrier-class equipment built on CGL and ATCA specifications has reached $2 billion and is set to grow to $5 billion in 2012, according to market researchers IDC. Original equipment manufacturers such as Advantech, Emerson Network Power (which acquired Motorola’s ECC board business and Artesyn), Kontron, Mercury Computer Systems, RadiSys, Sun Microsystems and others are all providing ATCA systems and components, while network equipment providers, or NEPs, such as Alcatel, Nortel, Motorola, NEC and Nokia Siemens Networks are selling ATCA-based systems running CGL in volumes. This market is alive and kicking, no question.

Standardising Complexity

Part of the challenge has been handling the complexity of the specification. Nine companies contributed to the first CGL specification release, which contained a total of 91 requirements. The next version, 2.0.2, was mainly a revision of 1.1, adding clustering and security as new categories and raising the number of requirements to more than 150, but the key point was to focus on releasing specifications, which allow flexibility in the implementation, rather than having fixed standards.

The next major release of the CGL requirements was a year-long jump: Version 3.0 was released in February 2005, to be followed by version 3.1 only four months later. Most CGL systems now deployed in the field are based on the version 3.2 release of requirements that came in February 2006.

Version 4.0 was released in March 2007 by the Linux Foundation Carrier Grade Linux working group and this set another milestone. This version started to incorporate prioritized requirements identified by the SCOPE Alliance, an association of NEPs that includes Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, Motorola, NEC, Nokia Siemens Networks and Nortel. This SCOPE Linux specification aims to accelerate the market deployment of carrier-grade platforms by developing profiles that describe what minimum requirements a control and management carrier-grade platform must have.

The SCOPE Alliance also described features that are not currently included in the CGL 4.0 specification. The profiles help to streamline implementations of specifications by describing the options and features of the underlying specifications that SCOPE considers to be necessary and sufficient in implementing carrier-grade platforms, while the gap analysis identifies missing functions or options in existing specifications. SCOPE has links with the Linux Foundation, Service Availability Forum and others, with individuals often being members of more than one industry alliance, to ease the coordination of the development of the different specifications.

CGL4.0 Is Dead; Long Live CGL 5.0

Before starting to work on version 5.0, the CGL working group analysed how accepted the specification had become, what works and what doesn’t. It worked closely with the Linux Foundation, members of the Linux community, the SCOPE Alliance and other NEPs in order to determine new requirements from these parties and document the requirements of NEPs that are not currently implemented in any stable or mature open source project. By working closely with the Linux community and Linux Foundation to get more requirements implemented and submitted upstream, these requirements may eventually become a part of the mainline kernel.

To accomplish this, the charter of the working group was changed: The working group used the CGL 4.0 requirements as a starting point and split them into requirements that already exist in some mature open source project and requirements that do no exist today. For each gap it was decided to either delete it because it would never be implemented in open source, or describe why the requirement is necessary and provide examples of how it would be used. The “satisfied requirements” list also provides suggestions of existing open source solutions but does not specify a specific implementation so that this is still left to the community and companies providing Carrier Grade Linux distributions.

Above the OS

Besides the Linux Foundation and SCOPE Alliance there are two other key contributors to Carrier Grade Linux: the SAForum and Open Service Availability Framework, or OpenSAF. The SAForum develops high availability and management software interface specifications that allow carrier-grade systems to deliver 24/7/365 services to customers, even if a hardware part breaks in two pieces or an application crashes, as long as there are hot standby hardware and applications that can take over the work seamlessly.

The SAForum has published the Hardware Platform Interface specification that monitors and controls the platform hardware and relies for that partly on the Intelligent Platform Management Interface. It provides discovery, event, alarm and event log functions and helps to manage the hot swap of hardware parts. Alongside this, the Application Interface Specification includes services to manage cluster membership, checkpoints, events, messages, locks, notifications and logging.

Besides the specifications there is the implementation. To satisfy the SAForum HPI interfaces there are numerous commercial implementations, as well as the OpenHPI and OpenIPMI active open source projects.

To provide an implementation for AIS, the OpenSAF project was launched in 2007. The project is backed by the OpenSAF Foundation that includes Emerson Network Power, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Wind River as members. The project did not start from scratch but uses work done by Motorola ECC (now a part of Emerson Network Power) to save time in implementation and testing. The results of the OpenSAF work will be made available under the LGPLv2.1 license, satisfying the needs of both the community as well as companies adopting and using it.

Summary

Building a carrier-grade system is a complex project. An implementation of Carrier Grade Linux 4.0 provides the necessary operating system functionality, while work from OpenIPMI, OpenHPI and OpenSAF addresses the high-availability middleware. The upcoming CGL release 5.0 will incorporate the work of other industry alliances such as SCOPE, making it even more optimized to the specific needs of the telecoms market. CGL-based systems are ready for prime time now, rather than in the distant future.

Hans Juergen Rauscher is the system architect for networking for Central Europe at Wind River (www.windriver.com) in Germany and consults with key telecoms accounts about networking technologies and Linux.

Aviation has understood the message to become more efficient and cleaner loud and clear.  Much can be done by improving engine emissions and fuel efficiency. The latest Pratt & Whitney 10,000lb thrust aircraft engine is forecasted to cut fuel consumption by around 12% at its service entry in 2013. It will release much less nitrogen oxide & carbon monoxide and will be significantly quieter. Other manufacturers such as Rolls-Royce are set to achieve similar margins with their newest developments.

Several contributions

Although reducing emissions is an important part of the solution, no single measure will suffice to reach the required targets.  Equally important are aims to enhancing aircraft operational efficiency so that any given amount of fuel goes a much longer way - and electronics will have to play a significant role in facilitating those efficiency gains. Aircraft electronics (Avionics) and aeronautical communication networks (Connectivity) tell pilots and ground crew about the state of the aircraft and improve situational awareness, leading to higher capacity and efficiency, providing a safe service with less disruption and reduced travel time. But technology alone, whether airborne or ground-based cannot create the necessary step changes. Air Traffic Management (ATM) infrastructures will need to be unleashed from their current procedural shackles that are often driven by outdated national soverenity interests, particularly in the crowed skies of Europe. A typical one-hour flight from London Heathrow to Cologne takes the aircraft through four different national airspaces, each endowed with a Flight Information Region (FIR) and its associated Air Traffic Control Centre.

747 Cockpit

All this is about to change since EURONTROL has lent its support to the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) programme. SESAR is the European Air Traffic Management modernisation programme. It combines technological, economic and regulatory aspects and will use the Single European Sky (SES) legislation to implement the programme. The SESAR Consortium comprises of 29 companies with 21 associated partners:

• Airspace Users
• Air Navigation Service Providers
• Airports
• Supply Industry
• Safety Regulators
• EUROCONTROL

Taking a multi-pronged approach, it addresses technological, environmental and economic aspects of aircraft operations for 2020 and beyond. Efficient satellite and VHF-based data communication links combined with advanced avionics lie at the heart of the enabling solutions, realising collaborative planning, demand/capacity balancing of networked operations and 4D trajectory flight routing where basic airspace boundary management prevailed before. Satellite based air-ground data links will compliment existing VHF communications for new high capacity & high availability ATM messages services. Airline operations will see benefits through fuel efficient routes & flight profiles. New carbon efficient engine technologies together with remote engine diagnostics ensure that engines are kept at peak performance and any deterioration can be detected from the onset in flight and corrected at the next arrival. The emerging data link and messaging make use of:

• Environmental Data distribution, air-ground exchange of flight information
• Introduction of a sub-regional Air-Ground data link management sub-system
• Downlink of the aircraft flight path trajectory via satellite links and VHF
• Protected band “WiMAX” IEEE 802.16 for secure airport surface data link operations;
• Seamless network protocol to interconnect all nodes (e.g. IP).

Environmental benefits are expected to materialise as these technologies are implemented, particularly reduction in fuel burn due to optimisation of flight profiles resulting in reduction of gaseous emissions (CO₂/No_x) and noise reduction and improved air quality. The carbon savings are estimated by the SESAR team at around 125 - 155 ktonnes of CO₂ per annum. In fact, these savings are a strong driver for the airline industry to invest into the new technology. The other driver comes from the knowledge that with the anticipated increase in air-ground air traffic management communications and the emerging market demand for passenger communication services, current systems and technologies are expected to become saturated by 2020. The majority of Pilot to Controller communications today is voice based. To make better use of scarce capacity, SESAR compliant communications will rely more and more on data links. Nevertheless, current cockpit data protocols still conform to the X.25 ITU-T standard network layer protocol for packet switched data and the Air Transport industry faces a complex IP based network architecture evolution. IP-based networking solutions for air/ground communication will need to be deployed for cost savings, high reliability and an optimal alignment with the evolution of communication and security technologies.

Current and future aircraft communications

Civil aircraft today are fitted with two or three VHF radios for Air Traffic Control (ATC) and Airline Operational Control (AOC) in controlled airspace, two HF radio systems for oceanic and remote operations. Long haul, wide body aircraft such as the Boeing 747 and the Airbus A-340 are increasingly equipped with one or two Satellite Communication systems for oceanic and remote operational use and passenger communications, supported by one Gatelink radio system for short range data links at airports. Future regulation and market demand will add two L-band radios called L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (L-DACS) to augment the VHF systems, two new ATC Satcoms for Oceanic Air Traffic Management, replacing HF and WiMAX based radio systems for enhanced short range data links at airports (replacement for Gatelink). New Air to ground high bandwidth Ku-band passenger links are taking care of cabin connectivity requirements. - All are stand-alone systems with dedicated flight crew management panels or screens with little automated operation. Not surprisingly, pilot workload is a concern and higher levels of integration will become indispensable. Aeronautical standardisation and engineering committees are making good headway towards defining an onboard communications network that meets the need for integrated aircraft avionics architectures and that supports the future aeronautical air-ground data link communication requirements: At the beginning of 2008, the “Integrated Communications, Navigation and Surveillance Conference” assessed suitable system architectures and recommend system definition and avionics standardisation activities on the basis of the architecture shown in the diagram below. Insert

Connectivity Network Architecture

An EC funded 7^th Framework Research project has been tasked with reducing the number of aircraft radios systems to a reconfigurable system that will fully integrate with the future Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) concepts, aiming for:

• Integration of a full range of applications and services
• Secure networks
• Effective firewalls between passenger and cockpit domain
• Network integration
• Unification of networking protocols
• Inter-working of different radio access technologies through a common IP-based aeronautical network
• Integration of radio technologies in an Integrated Modular Radio platform
• Hybrid Ku/L band Satcom antenna to develop an asymmetric high rate Data Link

The diagram below shows the system architecture concept envisioned by the EC research project.

Connectivity Layer 2 Architecture

Security and safety

However, the aviation community has also raised security concerns, insisting that the airborne network architecture consists of several securely segregated domains when using shared resources. Security must be designed into the network at multiple layers, into the network as a whole and into individual components. There are different security aspects and risks for each domain (risk-based security approach):

• Aircraft Control -> flight safety, availability, confidentiality
• Airline Operations -> integrity, confidentiality
• Passenger/Cabin -> confidentiality

A security failure of the avionics could result in exposure of confidential data, compromise the integrity of the data, or affect the availability of the data. Attacks could come from the Passenger/Cabin domain in an attempt to reach the cockpit. Security controls or functions of the modems, the server(s) and its Ethernet interfaces should therefore be resistant to such failures, yet the OSI Model layer 2 (Media Access Control layer) typically implemented as Ethernet, has no inherent security. Once an hacker has direct access to layer two, full compromise of the system is possible. Security controls must therefore be implemented at higher layers as well as in the physical environment. This means that the Ethernet interface should allow authenticated and encrypted connections when needed for the different domains and that steps should be taken to ensure that malicious cabin network activities cannot interfere with higher security domains. Insert altimeter image

Significant returns

Provided all planned Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) programme phases will be implemented, the operational efficiency gains and aviation carbon footprint reduction will be very significant indeed by the year 2020. European airspace en-route capacity is expected to increase by 31-40% and Flight inefficiency reduced by 25% (i.e. by more than 2 km/flight/year). Delays are set to reduce by 1.2 minutes/flight while traffic may increase up to 15.8 Million flights/year. Emissions are expected to reduce through approx. 3% fuel saving, leading to 125-155 Ktonnes per year less CO₂ and removing up to 44% ground emissions at a typical hub airport. The associated cost savings are estimated at €0.7 - 1.1Bn/year for scheduled airlines. By 2020, the direct ATM cost is forecasted to be reduced from €800 to €630 per flight, and 50% ATM cost per flight reduction thereafter.  Most of these savings can be achieved by more efficient ATM, targeting 98% of flights to depart on time and under 5% of flights to be less than 3 minutes delayed at arrival. More effective en-route airspace management based on flight path Trajectory Management and Automation will permit reduction of aircraft separation. This is the distance aircraft have to be kept apart to compensate actual heading and altitude inaccuracies. Future en-route clearances will be issued as initially 3D and later 4D Precision Trajectory Clearances, exploiting data links and trajectory exchange capability with the resulting navigation precision. This will allow the delegation of separation responsibility from ATM to the pilot for a specific situation: the controller detects situation - flight crew executes resolution. Insert Runway Ahead However, flight crews need to be equally supported to benefit from the technologies. The cockpit avionics will be adapted to reduce pilot workload whilst offering enhanced capabilities. Synthetic Vision Systems will provide flight crew with synthetic/graphical view, using terrain imagery and position/altitude on Head Up Display (HUD) technology to facilitate approach and ground operations in low visibility. Remote Tower Operations will exploit remote sensors in real-time, enhancing safety of oeprations in a cost effective way.

Rainer Koll is Managing Director of Rainer J. Koll Consulting Ltd (www.rjk-consulting.co.uk) and he specialises in Aerospace and Telecom. Rainer is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and has managed large avionics businesses and major technology development programmes.

The founding function of cellular communications was to extend the reach of the phone outdoors into the wider world - so one could always be in touch. But over the past few years the cellular telecommunications industry has undergone a metamorphosis so that it is now most excited about a new cellular technology that turns this thinking inside out. Operators are now looking to bring their cellular networks inside the home. They plan to supplement their outdoor mobile phone masts with the polar opposite in the home - an extremely low power, tiny cellular access point - a femtocell. Femtocells not only improve mobile service indoors but also change the economics of the industry - bringing down costs for consumers and operators alike. But why have these femtocells come about and what challenges do they face?

The mobile industry has always grappled with two major issues:- coverage and capacity.  This is as true today as ever with 3G networks providing poor in-building coverage and capacity concerns in the operator’s backhaul network meaning that mobile broadband services cannot support widespread usage.  The reasons for this are very simple.

Mobile broadband radio networks generally use relatively high frequency signals due to the greater availability of bandwidth. However signals at these frequencies do not penetrate well through walls, thereby creating coverage issues inside buildings. Additionally, mobile users indoors require more powerful signals to penetrate walls which removes capacity and means fewer users can be accommodated in a cell. Somewhat ironically, 90% of data usage takes place indoors proving that mobile broadband isn’t all about mobility.  And although 3G services have been slow to be adopted, the growing availability of usable mobile devices and flat-rate near-unlimited data plans have led to a huge leap in take-up which is in turn putting a major strain on backhaul capacity.

So mobile operators face a dilemma - mobile broadband clearly represents the future of their business, yet coverage and capacity challenges prevent them from delivering such services effectively and economically over the long term. In femtocells, operators have found a dramatically unconventional approach to resolving this situation.

Femtocells linked to a cellular network

A femtocell is a small device that plugs into a domestic broadband connection and can give perfect mobile phone coverage throughout a home or office, cheaper higher quality phone calls, faster mobile broadband and brand new services - all using existing cellular handsets and devices. In a stroke, operators eliminate both their capacity and coverage challenges. Instead of pouring more investment into their outdoor networks to provide extra capacity in the backhaul and over the air, femtocells offer a genuine alternative. Also by solving the in-building coverage issue from the inside out, the upper reaches of the spectrum which offer massive bandwidth potential are no longer out of consideration. 

What are Femtocells?

But let’s take a step back - what exactly do we mean by a femtocell?  For example how is it any different from a Wi-Fi access point?  First and foremost, femtocells use licensed spectrum, unlike Wi-Fi, which mean they deliver assured service quality over the air and can only be offered by a mobile operator. The devices which operators are currently planning to launch will mostly support 3G networks although some 2G devices exist and WiMAX devices are planned. Femtocells can come in the form of a standalone access point or as part of a home gateway which would also typically include Wi-Fi and a DSL or cable modem.  They must meet a consumer price point and must be entirely end user installed - in fact most femtocells are ‘zero-touch’ meaning they have no buttons and auto-configure once attached to power and a broadband connection.

Typically, a single femtocell will deliver voice services simultaneously to at least four users within the home, while allowing many more to be connected or ‘attached’ to the cell, accessing services such as SMS. Additionally, femtocells will deliver data services to multiple users, typically at the full peak rate supported by the relevant air interface technology, currently several megabits per second and rising to tens and hundreds of megabits per second in the future. But by removing the capacity hungry indoor mobile users from the outdoor network, femtocells also in effect improve performance for consumers outside. Indeed, for each additional indoor femtocell user, system resources are freed to serve about ten outdoor users. The femtocell behaves like a normal base station in that as users enter or leave the home their voice or data services are seamlessly handed over from or to the outdoor network as required.

Subscribers benefit from perfect cellular coverage and faster mobile broadband in the home as well as a more competitive voice and data tariff. Operators get optimum cellular coverage and more mobile usage in the home and dramatically reduced operating costs especially through backhaul - their single largest OPEX  - and power savings.  Equally importantly the cellular operators’ capital expenditure will significantly drop because accelerating data usage means they will inevitably have to heavily invest in their outdoor network in terms of new cell sites and backhaul to meet expected demand - something femtocells do at a fraction of the cost. In fact, Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm’s CEO, recently said that the gains in throughput available to femtocell users are “equivalent to that brought by the cell phone’s shift from analogue to digital.”

Finally, as mobile operators look beyond 3G to LTE or WiMAX, femtocells offer a new, dramatically lower-cost model for network rollout.  For example, LTE femtocells could be employed using higher frequencies to deliver targeted intense high bandwidth requirements inside buildings - exactly where subscribers most demand it. Operators can then use their existing networks outdoors as demand slowly builds up and then use the scarce lower frequency spectrum to provide good quality LTE coverage across entire markets with the minimum number of outdoor network cells.  As we have seen, the simple proposition of lower costs, for both operators and consumers, combined with improved coverage and services is compelling. Yet there are also challenges which must be overcome before widespread commercial deployments can become a reality. 

Building standards and inter-operability

Femtocell deployments require not only a device in the home, but also equipment in the mobile core or cellular network that integrates potentially millions of femtocells into the network.  Unfortunately mobile networks are designed to support thousands of base stations, not millions, so a femtocell concentrator is required. If the costs of deployments are to be kept low it is important that the concentrator is standardised thereby encouraging economies of scale.

Fortunately, not only are there a number of existing standardised network solutions that can accommodate femtocells, but the various vendors and operators have already collaborated in the Femto Forum to create a femtocell specific standard interface, which will be standardised within 3GPP. This standardisation effort will in turn have a major affect on reducing the cost of femtocell deployments due to economies of scale and competition.  Crucially, unlike technological standards wars such as CDMA vs GSM and BluRay vs HD-DVD, consumers aren’t affected as their handsets will work with any femtocell. 

The Interference Challenge

A major technical challenge that femtocell designers have faced comes in the form of interference. Many operators have only two or three distinct radio channels available for operating 3G networks. These operators have little or no scope for separating the spectrum used by femtocells from that used by their existing outdoor cell network. A key design goal for femtocells is then to be able to operate on the same frequency as the outdoor cells, without degrading the overall network performance with interference. This has to be achieved despite the dramatic increase in the number of cells involved in large femtocell deployments. Fortunately a strong inherent interference mitigation factor is provided by the fact that the walls of buildings that have served to keep 3G signals out also keep the signals in.  However, clearly some signals emitted from the femtocell will escape the home. As such femtocells will include specific features, such as frequent monitoring of their surrounding radio environment combined with adaptive power control. This allows femtocells to realise substantial capacity gains while ensuring that the performance available to all users is at least as good as the network without femtocells.

Keeping it legal

But what if an enterprising subscriber decided to pack their femtocell in their holiday suitcase in order to enjoy discounted voice and data wherever they go?  Such a situation is likely to constitute an illegal use of transmitting devices and an inappropriate use of the spectrum which is a vital business asset for operators. As a result operators have specified that femtocells are designed so that this does not happen.

Femtocells are highly intelligent devices, quite different from the illegal ‘boosters’ which are sometimes installed without an operator’s permission. Operators can identify the femtocell’s location using a variety of means, such as ‘sensing’ the surrounding network or by using the IP addresses of the DSL or cable network and restrict service appropriately.

Don’t panic!

While the analogy of the femtocell as a domestic cellular base station is instructive, it is also open to misinterpretation. While a femtocell carries out the same basic function as a mobile base station it uses tens of thousands of times less power - indeed even typically one-tenth of that of a Wi-Fi access point.  Mobile phones themselves emit far less power when connected to a femtocell than in their normal environment, thereby helping to extend battery life. A key challenge for the industry is just getting this message across in an environment where some elements of the press are likely to respond without an understanding of the engineering facts.

 All of these challenges - and several smaller ones - need to be addressed swiftly if femtocells are to realise their potential. However, they certainly aren’t holding many operators back. 

Last year, Sprint-Nextel in the US became the world’s first operator to deploy femtocells but only for 2G voice - not broadband data where the main benefits reside.  Japan’s SoftBank recently announced it is to deploy 3G femtocells in January 2009 and several other European operators are likely to follow in quick succession.  It now looks like 2010 will be the year where mass uptake will occur.

Femtocells represent a huge new opportunity for the mobile industry and provide a service for customers where a pent-up demand already exists.  The concept of moving the operator’s radio network into the consumer’s home turns traditional cellular thinking on its head. Yet the proposition holds so many benefits for customers and operators alike that its appeal is undeniable.

Professor Simon Saunders is one of the world’s leading authorities on femtocells and is currently chairman of the Femto Forum (www.femtoforum.org).  As chairman Simon works to drive the uptake of femtocell technologies through open standards, market education and ecosystem development. He is an independent wireless communications specialist with more than 20 years industry experience. Simon has consulted for a range of companies including O2, Ofcom, NTL, BT, Motorola, BBC and many others. He is the author of books and articles and is a regular speaker at industry conferences. In May 2007 Simon was appointed to Ofcom’s Spectrum Advisory Board.

Standards-based technologies are rapidly being adopted by the telecommunications industry, and for good reason. Leveraging standards-based solutions allows telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) and network equipment providers (NEPs) to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software systems across multiple network elements-speeding time-to-market, saving money, and freeing up key resources to focus on competitive differentiation.

Equally important, the adoption of standards-based elements enables new and emerging hardware to plug into an existing network infrastructure without extensive retooling and associated costs. It also encourages use of best-of-breed technologies without imposing vendor lock-in. For much of the new hardware being deployed in next generation networking (NGN) infrastructures, the de facto standard is the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA). ATCA is a perfect example of a standard that not only promises all the benefits of a COTS solution, but has also reached a point of maturity for wide use in real-world implementations.

Getting standards-based technologies to deliver on their intended promise requires heavy lifting and cooperation. For many industries, such as mobile phones, the proliferation of special interest groups (SIGs) has led to overlap and competing standards, resulting in a splintered, confused industry and delays in standards adoption.

In the communications industry, however, there is significant cooperation between different SIGs. In telecommunications, nearly a dozen SIGs have worked to define the technology components that fit into an overall solution. Some of the most notable SIGs include the Communications Platform-Trade Association (CP-TA), PICMG, the SCOPE Alliance, the Service Availability Forum (SAF), and The Linux Foundation.

Each communication SIG has a specific function and focus: The Linux Foundation, created by a merger between the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group, focuses on specifications for the Linux OS; PICMG focuses on standards for ATCA hardware; the SAF focuses on middleware above the OS; and the CP-TA focuses on interoperability between different vendor implementations of hardware and software. The SCOPE Alliance doesn’t define any particular standard, but creates desired technology profiles based on Linux Foundation, PICMG, and SAF specifications.

Unlike in many other industries, communications SIGs work closely together. The CGL specification developed by The Linux Foundation includes some standards defined by the SAF and specifies support for ATCA. A loose consortium, the Mountain View Alliance, provides a liaison, marketing, and awareness function for all communications SIGs.

A Brief History of Carrier Grade Linux

Carrier Grade Linux, CGL is the operating system of choice for ATCA-based network equipment and is considered the architectural “hub” that defines many telecom solutions. CGL is designed to support all the hardware capabilities (such as booting from flash or support for ATCA hot-plug, along with high-availability middleware interfaces) to create the foundation for a complete carrier-grade solution and ensure high performance.

Carrier Grade Linux, CGL was started by OSDL in January 2002. Equipment providers such as Nokia, Ericsson, and Alcatel, were initial members and contributors. The first two releases of the CGL spec resulted in approximately 200 requirements across five different categories: Hardware, Performance, Standards, Availability, and Serviceability. At least seven different Linux distributions claimed compliance.

In 2005, the third CGL specification, version 3.2, was created. It added two more requirements categories, Clustering and Security, growing the number of overall requirements to more than 280. However, by the time the 3.2 spec was released, the CGL Working Group realized there was no way to consistently measure how each distribution supported the CGL specification. One distribution might support the majority of requirements, while another supported only a handful. Ultimately, while significant in scope, CGL 3.2 didn’t hit the mark in establishing a complete requirements list that met the needs of TEMs and NEPs. Many TEMs discontinued active participation in the CGL Working Group, and some in the industry wondered if the CGL specification had run its course.

Around the same time, many top-tier TEMs formed their own association, the SCOPE Alliance, to focus on hardware and software profiles they believed were most important in implementing COTS building blocks for carrier-grade-base platforms. The SCOPE Alliance quickly became an important force in the ecosystem, taking an active interest in CGL and making a conscious effort to focus on the operating system first.

This action by the SCOPE Alliance changed everything for CGL. It clearly indicated that the CGL specification was important and relevant to equipment providers-the primary consumers of CGL. It also initiated a tight working relationship between the CGL Working Group and equipment providers, a relationship that had been missing. Suddenly, the CGL specification was on a path to renewed relevance.

CGL 4.0: Tighter Alignment, Tighter Compliance

In late 2006, the CGL Working Group and members of the SCOPE Alliance joined forces to develop a new version of the carrier Grade Linux, CGL specification, 4.0. One of the major goals of CGL 4.0 was to align with the SCOPE Alliance Linux Profile. This profile prioritized Carrier Grade Linux, CGL 3.2 requirements into three categories: mandatory, desired, and roadmap. This was considered a huge contribution toward moving the CGL spec forward. The users of CGL-TEMs and NEPs-provided critical input on what was absolutely required in a Linux distribution to develop ATCA-based applications.

The CGL Working Group also worked to address criticism that the specification was inconsistently implemented across distributions. In earlier spec releases, any Linux distribution that met even a few CGL requirements could claim compliance-and because The Linux Foundation (formerly OSDL) did not endorse or validate the veracity of the registration disclosure data, there was no guarantee of complete feature support. In an effort to solve this problem, the CGL Working Group created a more formal process for registering Linux software as CGL-compliant. Linux distribution providers could follow this process to ensure they delivered consistent functionality.

In February 2007, The Linux Foundation released the CGL 4.0 specification. This version does not represent a host of new technical requirements, but it highlights the unprecedented level of cooperation that led to CGL 4.0, especially between The Linux Foundation and the SCOPE Alliance. A key focus of the revised specification is to meet the needs of its primary users: equipment providers.

With CGL 4.0, when an equipment provider specifies the need for a carrier Grade Linux, CGL distribution, there is a consistent standard for what that means and for verifying the claim. CGL 4.0 specifies that a software distribution must meet all 135 mandatory requirements before claiming CGL compliance, guaranteeing a higher level of functionality in CGL-compliant distributions.

This major step will help accelerate growth and adoption of CGL, and further integration with ATCA-based COTS hardware, ultimately resulting in accelerated time-to-market for NEPs, TEMs, and service providers.

What’s New in CGL 4.0

In carrier Grade Linux, CGL 4.0, all the specifications defined in version 3.2 have been regrouped and reprioritized to reflect the SCOPE Alliance profile. A few other requirements have also been added (visit www.linuxfoundation.org for a complete list of CGL requirements).

Tremendous effort was required to update the specification from 3.2 to 4.0. The CGL Working Group reviewed the entire spec item by item, adding new requirements, removing old requirements, acting on change requests, correcting errata, and clarifying definitions. In some cases, an existing requirement was broken into multiple better-defined requirements. This resulted in a much clearer set of requirements that more accurately reflects the current state of Linux functionality available for carrier-grade-class systems.

CGL 4.0 comprises more than 250 individual requirements covering seven categories, or “books”: Performance, Hardware, Standards, Serviceability, Availability, Security, and Clustering. Each core member of the CGL Working Group (Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, MontaVista, Motorola, NTT, and Wind River) was responsible for updating each book.

Feedback from the SCOPE Alliance was taken into account by the CGL Working Group during their edits. “SCOPE and The Linux Foundation are both committed to accelerating the deployment of carrier-grade-base platforms based on open industry specifications,” says Leslie Guth, SCOPE Alliance Marketing Co-Chair and Board Member. “With the cooperation of OSDL prior to the merger and The Linux Foundation since, we’ve worked to align the CGL specification with our released Carrier Grade Profile, and we look forward to the benefits-such as faster time-to-market-that interoperable commercial off-the-shelf building blocks bring.”

The new Carrier Grade Linux, CGL 4.0 specification also includes useful information and resources for developers. The specific tools and APIs needed for CGL distributions are specified, and proofs of concepts (PoCs) are provided, along with reference code. The PoCs play a critical role, because they refer to existing open-source projects that can be used to implement the CGL requirement. All requirements in the specification must have an associated PoC. In some cases, there may be multiple PoCs or other open-source projects available to meet a requirement. This has a dual impact: First, all distributions registering for CGL 4.0 will have a consistent set of features, with at least one active open-source project supporting it. Second, because there are often many ways to implement a feature, there is room for different distributions to compete and differentiate. This improves the overall quality and choice available to providers implementing CGL.

Carrier Grade Linux: Now a Linux Standard Base Workgroup

With publication of CGL 4.0 complete, The Linux Foundation is in the process of rechartering the CGL Working Group to fit the foundation’s organizational structure. The foundation plans to integrate the CGL specification into the Linux Standard Base (LSB). The LSB delivers interoperability between applications and the Linux OS. Currently, all major distributions comply with the LSB, and many leading application vendors-such as MySQL, RealNetworks, and SAP-are certifying. The LSB provides a cost-effective way for vendors to target multiple Linux distributions while building only one software package.

For end users, the LSB and its mark of interoperability preserves choice by allowing them to select the applications and distributions they want, while avoiding technology and vendor lock-in. LSB certification of distributions results in more applications being ported to Linux, and ensures that distribution vendors are compatible with those applications. The LSB ensures that Linux does not fragment.

By adding the CGL specification as a LSB certification or sub-profile, The Linux Foundation will raise the bar even further for the CGL spec, improving its already high level of credibility and value for equipment providers.

Summary: The Impact of CGL 4.0

The CGL 4.0 specification has immediate, ongoing benefits for everyone who develops, deploys, and uses Linux-based software for communications-based applications.

• For TEMs and NEPs, a unified, stable specification means faster time-to-market, investment protection, a longer life cycle for network equipment, improved interoperability, a real multi-vendor ecosystem, and streamlined compliance with environmental standards.
• For Hardware and Software COTS Vendors, reduced fragmentation of the ecosystem will motivate application vendors to produce off-the-shelf building-block components consistent with the needs of TEMs and NEPs.
• For Service Providers, CGL 4.0 means the ability to accelerate service deployment with confidence, knowing the platform is stable and delivers a high level of functionality, performance, and reliability.
• For Developers, specifying the right tools and practices for carrier-grade development, along with PoCs and reference code, simplifies and expedites the development process.
• For End Customers and End Users, the net result is equipment and services that deliver exceptional performance and availability, increased freedom of choice and quality of services, and a seamless user experience.

Glenn Seiler of Wind River (www.windriver.com) was the Steering Committee Chairperson for the CGL Working Group of the OSDL and remains an active member of the new Carrier Grade Working Group of The Linux Foundation.

The Linux Foundation (www.linux-foundation.org) is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007 by the merger of the OSDL and the Free Standards Group, the foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open-source companies and developers around the world.

The SCOPE Alliance (www.scope-alliance.org) is an association of NEPs aimed at accelerating the deployment of carrier-grade-base platforms for service provider applications. SCOPE was founded by Alcatel, Ericsson, Lucent, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, and Siemens.