Both products are part of the San Jose, California-based network vendor’s IP NGN portfolio, and to resonate at this week’s 3GSM World Congress, they focus on cellular networks, though the CSG technology can also be used by wireline operators.
Jon Hindle, director of mobile service provider marketing for Cisco, said both the products are delivered as line cards in the company’s 7600 router family.
Last year we announced optimization for the radio access network via compression on the backhaul, he said, and now we’re adding the Ethernet transport option to the aggregation point in the RAN. He said Backhaul from BSTs to the nodes where traffic is aggregated has traditionally been done with the A protocol over a leased line, SDH, or microwave link, but now it’s going increasingly to Ethernet.
He said Ethernet brings its own challenges as a transport protocol because you can’t recover the clock to coordinate [the traffic]. To address this issue, Cisco proposes a Pseudowire emulation of a deterministic circuit, with the actual networking protocol over which the link runs being MPLS. The technique it proposes is called Any Transport Over MPLS, or ATOM, and is delivered on the card in the 7600.
The second announcement is related to the Service Exchange Framework layer in the IP NGN. It is the second generation of the CSG card for the 7600. CSG1 has been around since the beginning of the decade when it was introduced to perform packet inspection and enable billing for content as well as prepaid services. The enhancements in CSG2 are in two areas: capacity, which has been doubled to support 1.2 million concurrent sessions, or approximately 300,000 subscribers per card; and policy handling, in terms of how the traffic is treated from a billing as well as a security perspective. We work with the Irish mobile security developer Adaptive Mobile in the area of parental control over content on their children’s phones, for instance, said Hindle.
He said the big difference on the policy-handling side is that with CSG1, the system needed to know what handset it was dealing with to enact billing or security policy, because it operated in half-proxy mode, whereas CSG2 passes TCP sessions through regardless now, because it’s in transparent mode.
