Technology

Overview

At a time when carriers face ever-increasing demands for bandwidth and increased competition from wireless and cable operators, they primarily have a physical infrastructure that was created based on legacy technologies and methods. While today's infrastructure is highly reliable, it remains very expensive to maintain in terms of both capital and operations expense. For every dollar spent on capital equipment, carriers spend three dollars on operations, administration, and maintenance of the carrier network. As a result of the competitive landscape shift that started to accelerate in the late 1990s, carriers started to look at how to build and maintain their networks much more efficiently and cost effectively. One trend that has emerged is that rather than use older technologies such as SONET/TDM they started to demand networks that would use lower cost, highly commoditized Ethernet/IP equipment. The challenge however, is that the Ethernet products on the market were originally designed for enterprise networks which do not have the same capabilities that carrier networks demand for:

Since more than 90% of the traffic carried originates or terminates as Ethernet, there is considerable efficiency in keeping the traffic as predominantly Ethernet as voice, data and video traffic passes traverses the entire network.

Economic pressures are forcing carriers to start spending aggressively to create competitive networks based on Ethernet and IP that scale to meet the needs of high definition video, interactive data services and other new applications demanded by their customers. The caveat is that for a carrier-grade Ethernet network to be realistically deployed it must have the same scalability, reliability and "connection oriented" services model that are familiar to carriers while at the same time offer significant reductions in both capital and operations expense.

The early products that were deployed in carrier Ethernet applications were based on very expensive custom ASICs, highly programmable FPGAs or Network Processors. These approaches—while offering an advantage in early time to market—do not provide the long-term cost advantage demanded by equipment vendors. In addition to the high silicon cost there is also considerable R&D expense in writing the software to program these devices and in running the simulations that are demanded to ensure that their products can achieve the performance which is required for carrying large volumes of voice, video, and data traffic.

As a result, carrier equipment vendors are actively searching for a solution that is purpose built for the carrier Ethernet market, has support for the latest standards and is cost effective. At Lightstorm Networks, we believe packet transport technologies such as MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Ethernet are the future. Most of the world's data traffic starts and ends as Ethernet—but carrier networks predominantly use legacy technology to transport data traffic that is encapsulated in connection-oriented protocols. Driven by emerging standards, carrier networks are now rapidly adopting a network model that utilizes these new packet technologies at the edge and core.

These new initiatives combined with a robust silicon ecosystem are designed to take Ethernet and MPLS further into the most demanding networks that require guaranteed service delivery, unprecedented scalability and high reliability. Lightstorm is committed to delivering these technologies for network equipment providers and delivering feature-rich functionality with future-proof flexibility. By combining our unique knowledge of these emerging trends with patent-pending intellectual property and utilizing hundreds of man-years of experience in complex chip design, Lightstorm Networks is perfectly positioned to provide first-class silicon solutions to our customers.

Lightstorm supports standards from the IEEE, IETF, Metro Ethernet Forum and the ITU and develops interoperable solutions that support current and emerging network standards. We support the emerging Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB) and the Provider Backbone Bridging with Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE) standards as well as the Transport-MPLS (T-MPLS) networking paradigm for support of Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) and Virtual Private Wire Services (VPWS). Lightstorm offers a complete range of standards-based solutions that allow network equipment providers to enable next-generation optical transport services using the latest carrier Ethernet standards.

For more information on PBB, visit the IEEE page on 802.1ah and related specifications. Click here for more information on PBB-TE. For more information on T-MPLS, visit the T-MPLS Forum. The following recent industry articles also contain updated information on these technologies:

Please bookmark this page and come back often because we will be adding more information and links on carrier-grade Ethernet technology. Lightstorm also offers articles, presentations and other technical documents that cover carrier Ethernet silicon technologies that enable next-generation optical transport services, so register now for access to more information on our leading-edge technology.