Products

Hudson OAM Service Accelerator

The success of carrier Ethernet depends greatly on its ability to provide service providers with the same management framework and tools to which they have become accustomed. Critical to that expectation is "SONET like" restoration times on services in less than 50ms. To ensure that level of conformance, the network must track service health by monitoring continuity check messages (CCMs) between nodes in the network. The timing interval between CCMs can vary but could be as often as every 3.3ms. With next generation carrier Ethernet systems expected to manage thousands of services, monitoring these CCMs in control plane software, which is the common solution today, will simply not be possible.

The Hudson OAM service accelerator offloads software from generating, receiving and analyzing high frequency CCMs for Provider Backbone Bridge (PBB), PBB-Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE) and Transport Multiprotocol Label Switching (T-MPLS) networks. By using the Brooklyn-10 with the Hudson service accelerator, system OEMs can return the CPU to doing exception handling and other processing functions while offering the robust protection and restoration services demanded by carrier networks.

Hudson connects to the Brooklyn-10 and a control processor through a PCI bus. In a typical system, the control processor would configure the Hudson device to generate and receive CCMs on various ports of the Brooklyn-10. In the absence of any network changes or errors, Hudson would then manage the CCMs into and out of the platform without the need for software intervention. For each Maintenance Association (MA), the device maintains a timer and context which are used to detect any connectivity failures through loss of consecutive CCMs, signalled failures or an error in a packet's content. When a failure is detected, Hudson will interrupt the control processor to notify higher level software that a connectivity fault has occurred within one of the MAs it is monitoring.

Hudson has been developed in a low cost FPGA technology in order to meet the evolving Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) standards from IEEE (802.1ag) and ITU (Y.1731). It is highly configurable, supporting deployments in both Maintenance End Point (MEP) and Maintenance Intermediate Point (MIP) applications. It currently interfaces to control processors and the Brooklyn-10 through a PCI interface but future variants will also include an RGMII interface for more diverse applications. At a 3.3ms timer interval, it can support up to 1K connections. It scales linearly as the timing intervals increase up to a maximum of 15K MAs.

Register now with Lightstorm Networks and you will be able to download in-depth technical documents on the Hudson OAM Service Accelerator.