Last Update: v1.0 - January 2011

6WINDGate™

White Paper

Packet Processing Software for Wireless Infrastructure

6WINDGate White Paper

Packet Processing Software for Wireless Infrastructure

Performance Challenges for Wireless Networks As advanced services proliferate and video consumes an ever-increasing share of wireless network capacity, the requirements for high-performance processing of network traffic will continue to grow dramatically. Each piece of equipment in the network must achieve higher levels of packet processing performance. At the same time, the equipment must be designed to meet challenging power, cost and schedule requirements.

This white paper discusses how specialized software, designed for high-performance processing of network packets and optimized for multicore processors, enables system designers to meet the conflicting goals of high traffic rates, low system power and minimum system cost. The explanation will be illustrated using real-world examples of 4G equipment based on multicore Intel® Architecture (IA) platforms and will leave readers with a good understanding of how to use advanced multicore packet processing techniques effectively in next-generation networking equipment.

Designers of 4G telecom infrastructure products, whether LTE or WiMAX, face challenging performance requirements that cannot be addressed with the same techniques that worked for 2G and 3G equipment.

Driven by high-bandwidth Internet applications, the total traffic in the core network is growing at over 100% per year, so service providers expect individual network elements such as packet gateways to provide at least a corresponding increase in bandwidth.

At the same time, telecom equipment is increasingly deployed in commercial and outdoor environments without forced-air cooling, placing severe restrictions on the number of high-performance processor subsystems that can be used.

Finally, equipment suppliers operate under ever more challenging cost constraints. These apply both to CAPEX, since low product cost is essential to support worldwide deployments of 4G networks, and to OPEX, where electrical power, both to run the equipment and for cooling, is a major contributor to the calculation of overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

To be successful, developers of 4G networking equipment must deliver solutions that achieve maximum throughput for tomorrow’s network traffic patterns (dominated by video and data), while minimizing system-level power consumption and cost.

Core network traffic doubles every year

6WINDGate White Paper

Packet Processing Software for Wireless Infrastructure

Packet Processing Software Solutions For 4G networks, 3GPP has specified a flat IP-based network architecture (SAE: System Architecture Evolution) with the goal of efficiently supporting massive usage of IP services. As a consequence, the network architecture is much simpler than existing architectures such as 3G. However, as all the services (data, voice, video…) use IP packets, processing these packets efficiently becomes critical to ensure LTE system performance.

On top of the IP protocol itself (actually the two IP protocols as the SAE architecture supports both IPv4 and IPv6 versions), a large number of individual protocols have to be implemented:

• Low-level protocols such as IPsec (Internet Protocol Security), ROHC (Robust Header Compression) and VLAN (Virtual LAN).

• Within an overall 4G network, a number of protocols support communication between individual subsystems. For example, GTP (GPRS Tunneling Protocol) carries user data via IP tunnels between a Signaling Gateway (SGW) and a base station (eNodeB). Similarly, SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) implements signaling between the Mobility Management Entity (MME), the SGW and the eNodeB. Likewise, IPinIP, GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) or GTPu provide tunnel connections from the SGW to the Packet Gateway (PGW). And there are many more protocols that are used throughout the network.

• Differentiating the services is also critical. IP QoS is required to prioritize real-time traffic over pure data traffic. Similarly, packet inspection implements the mechanisms to identify the user traffic to provide a better service to users and/or applications.

All these protocols are encapsulated in IP packets. Starting from layer 2 protocols, packet processing software has to analyze successive encapsulated headers as fast as possible.

The critical performance challenge for 4G networking equipment is to process these IP packets at the highest possible throughput. In general, the designer’s objective is to perform this processing fast enough that the throughput of the equipment is limited, not by the packet processing performance, but by the speed of the physical network connection, typically 10Gb/s, 40Gb/s or, soon, 100Gb/s. If the processing throughput matches the speed of the network, the system is said to be performing at “wire-speed”, maximizing the efficiency of the equipment.

Over the past few years, developers of high-end processors migrated to multicore architectures in order to meet never-ending needs for increased performance in networking equipment and a constant evolution of customized protocols. The traditional processor design approach of continually increasing clock frequencies in order to boost performance led to prohibitive processor power consumption, since power is proportional to the square of the clock frequency. The industry adopted multicore architectures in which the cores run at a clock frequency that leads to manageable power consumption for the processor as a whole.

Today, all processors used in high-performance networking products are based on multicore architectures. These platforms provide the ideal environment for implementing the high-performance packet processing that is required for 4G equipment.

For developers of networking equipment, selecting a multicore processor for their system is only one step in designing a high-performance system solution. Generally, the more complex question is how to architect the software which, as explained above, typically needs to process packets from multiple streams of network traffic at wire-speed.

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6WINDGate White Paper

Packet Processing Software for Wireless Infrastructure

6WINDGate Benefits Summarized This white paper has illustrated some of the key benefits that the 6WINDGate packet processing software provides for developers of high-performance 4G wireless equipment. These benefits include:

• Optimized support for industry-leading multicore processor platforms such as the Intel® Xeon® processor E5645 running the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (Intel® DPDK) software;

• Portable software architecture, eliminating any dependency on a single processor or CPU vendor;

• Best-in-class packet processing performance, delivering seven to ten times the performance of standard OS networking stacks, enabling the development of 4G networking equipment that meets challenging performance requirements;

• Comprehensive set of 40+ optimized networking protocols, ideally suited to 4G equipment, eliminates the need to integrate networking software components from multiple suppliers;

• Full compatibility with standard OS APIs simplifies software development, integration and migration;

• Built-in support for High-Availability frameworks enables Carrier Grade system reliability;

• Full compatibility with all commercial Linux distributions for maximum flexibility in software platform design;

• Award-winning technology with best-in-class technical support, already deployed in 4G networking equipment by tier-1 OEMs worldwide.

Conclusions 4G equipment needs to achieve a breakthrough level of packet processing performance in order to provide advanced services for high numbers of users. While multicore processor platforms are capable of delivering impressive raw performance, standard OS networking stacks cannot reach the necessary throughput. The 6WINDGate software achieves a 7x to 10x improvement in packet processing performance and enables OEMs to meet 4G performance requirements. Because 6WINDGate is compatible with standard APIs and includes a comprehensive suite of optimized networking protocols, developers can accelerate their time-to-market by up to twelve months while reusing their existing software.

For more information, please visit www.6wind.com.

Deployed by tier-1 OEMs worldwide in 4G networking equipment