Xelerated Data Plane Software

Jumpstarting Carrier Ethernet Designs - MEA and UFA

Xelerated offers feature-rich data plane software for its network processors (NPU). These software products contain two parts: a forwarding plane application running on the NPU, and a corresponding control plane-API running on the CPU. The control plane-API utilizes a common hardware adaptation layer providing boot scripts, configuration modules and defined messages to access the forwarding plane from the control plane. It provides a stateless interface for adaptation to vendor specific control planes. The hardware abstraction layer is developed for Linux on Power-PC, however can easily be ported to other operating systems.

Xelerated's Metro Ethernet (MEA) and Unified Fiber Access (UFA) data plane products are provided in source code for easy customization to vendor specific control and management planes.

Metro Ethernet Application (MEA)

Carrier Ethernet and IP/MPLS standards continue to evolve quickly to support new services and make public networking more efficient. These standards are being enhanced by IEEE, MEF, Broadband Forum, ITU and IETF, and with service providers adopting different service models, system vendors are continuously pushed to offer more features.

The Metro Ethernet Application (MEA) offers an attractive solution. MEA has been developed with feature flexibility in mind, and provides a feature-rich and robust data plane software in compliance to Carrier Ethernet and IP/MPLS standards, saving development time and costs.

MEA gives system vendors a best-of-breed data plane software, used either as-is for production systems; or as a foundation for further enhancements with differentiating features - utilizing the programmability of Xelerated's NPUs.

Developed in close co-operation with Xelerated's customers, the MEA software has been tailored, enhanced and tested to support customer specific service provider requirements. Today, the software is shipping in a range of systems, e.g. Carrier Ethernet Switch/Routers, Metro Transport systems, Edge Routers and fiber access aggregation systems.

Each second, around the clock, the MEA data plane software processes millions and millions of packets in some of the world's largest service provider networks.

MEA Highlights

Easy integration with control and management plane stacks
Feature-rich and standards compliant
Foundation for system vendors to use either as-is or as a basis for customization
Robust C API, leverages SW investment across platforms
Wirespeed performance
Supports a wide range of memory types
Accelerates time-to-market. Software development time savings of 6-12 months
Reduces development cost between 1-2 MUSD
Maintenance including continuous feature enhancements
Data structures in standard ANSI-C, shared header files with control plane

Metro Ethernet Application Product Brief (pdf)

Unified Fiber Access Application (UFA)

The UFA data plane software provides a feature-rich data plane software for platforms targeting unified fiber access supporting PON, point-to-point Ethernet, and fiber-to-the-node.

In compliance with Carrier Ethernet standards, this software provides a reference access data plane solution, which can be customized to support vendor or service provider specific access designs for e.g. policy enforcement, subscriber identification and multicast snooping and replication.

The UFA data plane software is designed for the AX Family of programmable Ethernet switches.

UFA Highlights

Comprehensive feature set for PON OLT and point-to-point Ethernet access systems
Provided in source code to be used as-is or for customization
ANSI-C control plane APIs and data structures for easy integration to control planes
Advanced traffic management to enforce fine-granular QoS per user and service
Support for TR.101/TR.156 service delivery models
Flexible user and service classification and forwarding, supporting multiple deployment scenarios, including enterprise access and Open Access models for residential users
Multicast on L2 and L3 with IGMP snooping for efficient IPTV distribution

Unified Fiber Access Application Product Brief (pdf)