TIP launches a disaggregated cell-site gateway design
Four leading telecom operators, members of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), have developed a disaggregated white-box design for cell sites. The four operators are Orange, Telefonica, TIM Brazil and Vodafone. BT is also believed to be backing the open-design cell-site venture.
Source: ADVA
The first TIP cell-site gateway product, known as Odyssey-DCSG, is being brought to market by ADVA and Edgecore Networks.
TIP isn’t the only open design framework that is developing cell-site gateways. Edgecore Networks contributed in October a design to the Open Compute Project (OCP) that is based on an AT&T cell-site gateway specification. There are thus two overlapping open networking initiatives developing disaggregated cell-site gateways.
ADVA and Edgecore will provide the standardised cell-site gateways as operators deploy 5G. The platforms will support either commercial cell-site gateway software or open-source code.
“We are providing a white box at cell sites to interconnect them back into the network,” says Bill Burger, vice president, business development and marketing, North America at Edgecore Networks.
“The cell site is a really nice space for a white-box because volumes are high,” says Niall Robinson, vice president, global business development at ADVA. Vodafone alone has stated that it has 300,000 cell-site gateways that will need to be updated for 5G.
Odyssey-DCSG
A mobile cell site comprises remote radio units (RRUs) located on cell towers that interface to the mobile baseband unit (BBU). The baseband unit also connects to the disaggregated cell-site gateway with the two platforms communicating using IP-over-Ethernet. “The cell-site gateway is basically an IP box,” says Robinson.
The Odyssey gateway design is based on a general-purpose Intel microprocessor and a 120-gigabit Broadcom Qumran-UX switch chip.
The white box’s link speeds to the baseband unit range from legacy 10 megabit-per-second (Mbps) to 1 gigabit-per-second (Gbps). The TIP gateway’s uplinks are two 25-gigabit SFP28 modules typically. In contrast, the OCP’s gateway design uses a higher capacity 300-gigabit Qumran-AX switch chip and has two 100-gigabit QSFP28 uplink interfaces. “There is a difference in capacity [for the two designs] and hence in their cost,” says Robinson.
The cell-site gateway is basically an IP box
The cell-site gateways can be connected in a ring with the traffic fed to an aggregation unit for transmission within the network.
Robinson expects other players to join ADVA and Edgecore as project partners to bring the TIP gateway to market. To date, no software partners have been announced. First samples of the platform are expected in the first quarter of 2019 with general availability in the third quarter of 2019.
“Cell-site gateways is one of those markets that will benefit from driving a common design,” says Robinson. The goal is to get away from operators choosing proprietary platforms. “You have one design hitting the market and being chosen by the different end users,” he says. “Volumes go up and costs go down.”
ADVA is also acting as the systems integrator, offering installation, commissioning and monitoring services for the gateway. “People like disaggregation when costs are being added up but end users like things - especially in high volumes - to be reintegrated to make it easy for their operations folk,” says Robinson.
The disaggregated cell-site gateway project is part of TIP’s Open Optical and Packet Transport group, the same group that is developing the Voyager packet-optical white box.
Source: Gazettabyte
Voyager
ADVA announced recently that the Voyager platform is now available, two years after being unveiled.
The 1-rack-unit Voyager platform uses up to 2 terabits of the 3.2-terabit Broadcom Tomahawk switch-chip: a dozen 100-gigabit client-side interfaces and 800 gigabits of coherent line-side capacity.
Robinson admits that the Voyager platform would have come to market earlier had SnapRoute - providing the platform’s operating system - not withdrawn from the project. Cumulus Networks then joined the project as SnapRoute’s replacement.
“This shows both sides of the white-box model,” says Robinson. How a collective project design can have a key member drop out but also the strength of a design community when a replacement can step in.
TIP has yet to announce Voyager customers although the expectation is that this will happen in the next six months.
Robinson identifies two use cases for the platform: regional metro networks of up to 600km and data centre interconnect.
“Voyager has four networking ports allowing an optical network to be built,” says Robinson. “Once you have that in place, it is very easy to set up Layer-2 and Layer-3 services on top.”
The second use case is data centre interconnect, providing enterprises with Layer-2 trucking connectivity services between sites. “Voyager is not just about getting bits across but about Layer-2 structures,” says Robinson.
The Voyager is not targeted at leading internet content providers that operate large-scale data centres. They will use specific, leading-edge platforms. “The hyperscalers have moved on,” says Robinson. “The Voyager will play in a different market, a smaller-sized data centre interconnect space.”
We will be right at the front and I think we will reap the rewards for jumping in early
Early-mover advantage
Robinson contrasts how the Voyager and TIP’s cell-site gateway were developed. Facebook developed and contributed the Voyager design to TIP and only then did members become aware of the design.
With the cell-site gateway, a preliminary specification was developed with one customer - Vodafone - before it was taken to other operators. These companies that make up a good portion of the cell site market worked on the specification before being offered to the TIP marketplace for development.
“This is the right model for a next-generation Voyager design,” says Robinson. Moreover, rather than addressing the hyperscalers’ specialised requirements involving the latest coherent chips and optical pluggable modules, the next Voyager design should be more like the cell-site gateway, says Robinson: “A little bit more bread-and-butter: go after the 100-gigabit market and make that more of a commodity.”
ADVA also believes in a first-mover advantage with open networking designs such as the TIP cell-site gateway.
“We have been involved for quite some time, as has Edgecore with which we have teamed up,” says Robinson. “We will be right at the front and I think we will reap the rewards for jumping in early.”
Part 2: Open networking, click here
TIP tackles the growing complexity of open design
The TIP chairman and vice president, technology innovation at Deutsche Telekom described how the relentless growth of IP traffic is causing production costs to rise yet the average revenues per subscriber for bundled communications services is flat or dipping. “Not a good situation to be in,” he said. The industry is also investing in new technologies including the rollout of 5G.
Niall Robinson
The industry needs a radically different approach if it is to achieve capital efficiency, said Clauberg, and that requires talent to drive innovation. Garnering such talent needs an industry-wide effort and this is the motivation for TIP.
TIP
Established in 2016, TIP brings together internet giants Facebook and Microsoft with leading telecom operators, systems vendors, components players and others to co-develop open-source designs for telecoms. In the last year, TIP has added 200 companies to total over 500 members.
TIP used its second summit held in Santa Clara, California to unveil several new project groups. These include End-to-End Networking Slicing, Edge Computing, and Artificial Intelligence and Applied Machine Learning.
There are three main project categories within TIP: access, backhaul, and core and management. Access now includes six project groups including the new Edge Computing, backhaul has two, while core and management has three including the new network slicing and artificial intelligence initiatives. TIP has also established what it calls ecosystem acceleration centres and community labs.
“TIP is definitely bigger and, I think, better,” says Niall Robinson, vice president, global business development at ADVA Optical Networking. “As with any organisation there is always initial growing pains and TIP has gone through those.”
Open Optical Packet Transport
ADVA Optical Networking is a member in one of TIP’s more established projects, the Open Optical Packet Transport group which announced the 1-rack-unit Voyager packet transport and routing box last year.
OOPT itself comprises four work groups: Optical Line System, Disaggregated Transponders and Chips, Physical Simulation Environment and the Common API. A fifth group is being considered to tackle routing and software-defined interconnection.
Robinson highlights two activities of the OOPT’s subgroups to illustrate the scope and progress of TIP.
The Common API group in which Robinson is involved aims to bring commonality to the various open source groups’ application programming interfaces (APIs).
Open is great but there are so many initiatives out there that it is really not helping the market
The Open Networking Forum alone has several initiatives: the Central Office Rearchitected as a Data centre (CORD), the Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) SDN controller, the Open Core Model, and the Transport API. Other open initiatives developing APIs include OpenConfig set up by operators, the Open API initiative, and OpenROADM.
“Open is great but there are so many initiatives out there that it is really not helping the market,” says Robinson. An operator may favour a particular system vendor’s equipment that does not support a particular API. Either the operator or the vendor must then develop something, a situation in the case of an operator that can repeat itself many times. The goal of the Common API group’s work is to develop a mapping function between the software-defined networking (SDN) controller and equipment so that any SDN controller can use these industry-initiative APIs.
Robinson’s second example is the work of the OOPT’s Disaggregated Transponders and Chips group that is developing a transponder abstraction interface. The goal is to make it easier for vendors to benefit from the functionality of a transponder’s coherent DSP independent of the particular chip used.
“For ADVA, when we build our own gear we pick a DSP and we have to get our firmware to work with it,” says Robinson. “We can’t change that DSP easily; it’s a custom interface.”
The goal of the work is to develop a transponder abstraction interface that sits between the higher-level functionality software and the coherent DSP. The transponder vendor will interface its particular DSP to the abstraction interface that will then allow a network element’s software to configure settings and get optical monitoring data.
“It doesn’t care or even know what DSP is used, all it is talking to is this common transponder abstraction interface,” says Robinson.
Cassini and Voyager platforms
Edgecore Networks has contributed its packet transponder white box platform to the TIP OOPT group. Like Voyager, the platform uses the Broadcom StrataXGS Tomahawk 3.2 terabit switch chip. But instead of using built-in coherent interfaces based on Acacia’s AC-400 module, Cassini offers eight card slot options. Each slot can accommodate three module options: a coherent CFP2-ACO, a coherent CFP2-DCO or two QSFP28 pluggables. The Cassini platform also has 16 fixed QSFP28 ports.
Accordingly, the 1.5-rack-unit box can be configured as a 3.2 terabit switch using QSFP28 modules only or as a transport box with up to 1.6 terabits of client-side interfaces and 1.6 terabits of line-side coherent interfaces. This contrasts with the Voyager that uses up to 2 terabits of the switch capacity with its dozen 100-gigabit client-side interfaces and 800 gigabits of coherent line-side capacity.
There have also been developments with TIP’s Voyager box. Cumulus Network has replaced Snaproute to provide the platform’s Linux network operating system. ADVA Optical Networking, a seller of the Voyager, says the box will likely be generally available in the first quarter of 2018.
Robinson says TIP will ultimately be judged based on what it ends up delivering. “Eighteen months is not enough time for the influence of something like this to be felt,” he says.
TIP Summit 2017 talks, click here
TIP seeks to shake up the telecom marketplace
Niall Robinson
Now, ten telcos, systems vendors, component and other players have joined Facebook as part of the Telecom Infra Project, or TIP, to bring the benefits of open-source design and white-box platforms to telecoms. TIP has over 300 members and has seven ongoing projects across three network segments of focus: access, backhaul, and core and management.
Facebook's involvement in a telecoms project is to benefit its business. The social media giant has 1.79 billion active monthly users and wants to make Internet access more broadly available. Facebook also has demanding networking requirements, both the linking of its data centres and supporting growing video traffic. It also wants better networks to support emerging services using technologies such as virtual reality headsets.
It is time to disrupt this closed market; it is time to reinvent everything we have today
The telecom operators want to collaborate with Facebook having seen how its Open Compute Project has created flexible, scalable equipment for the data centre. The operators also want to shake up the telecom industry. At the inaugural TIP summit held in November, the TIP chairman and CTO of SK Telecom, Alex Jinsung Choi, discussed how the scale and complexity of telecom networks make it hard for innovators and start-ups to enter the market. “It is time to disrupt this closed market; it is time to reinvent everything we have today,” said Choi during his TIP Summit talk.
Voyager
TIP unveiled a white-box packet optical platform dubbed Voyager at the summit. The one rack-unit (1RU) box is a project for backhaul. Voyager has been designed by Facebook and the platform’s specification has been made available to TIP.
Voyager is based on another platform Facebook has developed: the Wedge top-of-rack switch for the data centre. Wedge switches are now being made by several contract manufacturers. Each can be customised based on the operating system used and the applications loaded onboard. The goal is to adopt a similar approach with Voyager.
“Eventually, there will be something that is definitely market competitive in terms of hardware cost,” says Niall Robinson, vice president, global business development at ADVA Optical Networking, one of the companies involved in the Voyager initiative. “And you have got an open-source community developing a feature set from a software perspective.”
Other companies backing Voyager include Acacia Communications, Broadcom and Lumentum which are involved in the platform’s hardware design. Snaproute is delivering the software inside the box while first units are being made by the contract manufacturer, Celestica.
ADVA Optical Networking’s will provide a sales channel for Voyager and is interfacing it to its network management system. The system vendor will also provide services and software support. Coriant is another systems vendor backing the project. It is providing networking support including routeing and switching as well as dense WDM transmission capabilities.
This [initiative] has shown me that the whole supply and design chains for transport can be opened up; I find that fascinating.
Robinson describes TIP as one of the most ambitious and creative projects he has been involved in. “It is less around the design of the box," he says. "It is the shaking up of the ecosystem, that is what TIP is about.”
A 25-year involvement in transport has given Robinson an ingrained view that it is different to other aspects of telecom. For example, a vendor’s transport system must be at each end of the link due to the custom nature of platforms that are designed to squeeze maximum performance over a link. “In some cases, transport is different but what TIP maybe realises is that transport does not always have to be different,” says Robinson. “This [initiative] has shown me that the whole supply and design chains for transport can be opened up; I find that fascinating.”
Specification
At the core of the 1RU Voyager is the Broadcom StrataXGS Tomahawk. The 3.2-terabit switch chip is also the basis of the Wedge top-of-rack switch. The Tomahawk features 128 x 25 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) serdes to enable 32 x 100 gigabit ports, and supports layer-2 switching and layer-3 routeing.
Voyager uses 12, 100 Gigabit Ethernet client-side pluggable interfaces and four 200-gigabit networking interfaces based on Acacia’s AC-400 optical module. The AC-400 uses coherent optics and supports polarisation multiplexing, 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-16QAM). “If it was a pure transport box the input rate would equal the output rate but because it is a packet box, you can take advantage of layer 2 over-subscription,” says Robinson.
At layer-3 the total routeing capacity is 2 terabits, the sum of the client and network interfaces. “At layer-3, the Tomahawk chip does not know what is a client port and what is a networking port; they are just Ethernet ports on that device,” says Robinson.
ADVA Optical Networking chose to back Voyager because it does not have a packet optical platform in its product portfolio. Until now, it has partnered with Juniper Networks and Arista Networks when such functionality has been needed. “We are chasing certain customers that are interested in Voyager,” says Robinson. “We are enabling ourselves to play in the packet optical space with a self-contained box.”
Status and roadmap
The Voyager is currently in beta-prototype status and has already been tested in trials. Equinix has tested the box working with Lumentum’s open line system over 140km of fiber, while operator MTN has also tested Voyager.
The platform is expected to be generally available in March or April 2017, by when ADVA Optical Networking will have completed the integration of Voyager with its network management system.
Robinson says there are two ways Voyager could develop.
Source: Gazettabyte
One direction is to increase the interface and switching capacities of the 1RU box. Next-generation coherent digital signal processors that support higher baud rates will enable 400Gbps and even 600Gbps wavelengths using PM-64QAM. This could enable the line-side capacity to increase from the current 800Gbps to 2 or 3 terabits. And soon, 400Gbps client-side pluggable modules will become available. Equally, Broadcom is already sampling its next-generation Tomahawk II chip that has 6.4 terabits of switching capacity.
Another direction the platform could evolve is to add an backplane to connect multiple Voyagers. This is something already done with the Wedge '6-pack' that combines six Wedge switch cards. A Voyager 6-pack would result in a packet-optical platform with multiple terabits of switching and routeing capacity.
“This is an industry-driven initiative as opposed to a company-driven one,” says Robinson. “Voyager will go whichever way the industry thinks the lowest cost is.”
Corrected on Dec 22nd. The AC-400 is a 5"x7" module and not as originally stated.