Proprietary designs once dominated telecom equipment.
Individual companies provided total solutions encompassing
the customer premises equipment, central-office gear, and a link
with the wide-area network. To remain competitive, cut costs,
and keep pace with technological innovation, vendors are now
moving from proprietary to standards-based designs. Several
organizations are involved in the definition of open platform
standards (see “Guide To The Emerging Telecom Standards:
Who Does What And Why” at www.electronicdesign.com, Drill
Deeper 18294).
The PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG)
defines board and chassis standards, including ATCA, AMC, and
MicroTCA. The Linux Foundation develops standards for carriergrade,
Linux-based operating systems. The Service Availability
Forum (SAF) addresses the specific needs of high-availability
system design, defining the management functions and interfaces.
The OpenSAF organization has assumed stewardship of
an open-source implementation of the SAF’s application interface
specification (AIS).
Several industry groups are building on these baseline platform
standards. The SCOPE Forum has developed profiles for ATCA and
AMC systems, carrier-grade operating systems, high-availability
middleware, and virtualization. The Open Communication Architecture
Forum (OCAF) Focus Group has developed reference
frameworks for both radio network controllers and media gateways.
The Communications Platform Trade Association (CP-TA) provides
documentation and test services for verifying the interoperability of
ATCA, MicroTCA, and AMC hardware. And, the Mountain View
Alliance (MVA) is emerging as an umbrella organization for all of
these organizations.