AT&T published specifications for a “white box” cell site gateway router designed to serve its backhaul transport requirements in its next-gen network. AT&T has previously disclosed plans to deploy up to 60,000 such routers at cell towers over the next few years. The specs, which are being released to the Open Compute Project, could be used by network vendors as reference designs. AT&T is developing its own network operating system software, based on technology from its Vyatta acquisition, to control and manage the white box hardware.
“This transformation is about meeting the surging data demands of our customers as we head into this 5G world,” said Chris Rice, senior vice president, Network Cloud and Infrastructure at AT&T. “Data traffic on our wireless network has grown 360,000% since 2007. We now carry more than 222 petabytes of data on an average business day. The old hardware model simply can’t keep up, and we need to get faster and more efficient. We believe this white box approach helps us meet that demand while allowing us and others now to innovate faster than ever before.”
AT&T said its white box could be coupled with a separate, disaggregated software solution. This creates several advantages:
- It decouples hardware from software, so providers have freedom to choose software implementations that best support their business and operational models.
- It is designed to support a wide range of speeds on the client side including 100M/1G needed for legacy Baseband Unit systems and next generation 5G Baseband Unit systems operating at 10G/25G and backhaul speeds up to 100G.
- It is designed to operate at industrial temperature ranges (-40C to +65C).
- It features the Broadcom Qumran-AX switching chip with deep buffers to support advanced features and QOS.
- It includes a baseboard management controller (BMC) for platform health status monitoring and recovery.
- It includes a powerful CPU for network operating software.
- It has timing circuitry that supports a variety of inputs and outputs to meet the evolving timing requirements and implementations in the 5G technology evolution.
“We’re very excited to be contributing our hardware specification to the Open Compute Project” said Michael Satterlee, vice president of Network Infrastructure and Services at AT&T Labs. “We’ve future-proofed it with high-speed interfaces and density, timing features, Quality of Service capabilities, and a powerful processor. We’re confident other mobile service providers will look at this spec and conclude, like us, that this platform can meet their needs.”
“Our product development and quality assurance processes are structured to ensure we deliver a reliable, feature-rich, and secure product into our production network” said Ken Duell, assistant vice president of Packet Edge Development at AT&T Labs. “We take our time and do it right because we know the stakes are high. We’re on track to meet the commitment made earlier this year to begin First Field Applications (FFA) this calendar year and in time refreshing our entire base of over 60,000 cell site routers to this new white box implementation.”
https://about.att.com/story/2018/5g_cell_specifications.html
The DANOS Project promises a Unified Network Operating System
The Linux Foundation will host a new Disaggregated Network Operating System (DANOS) project to enable community collaboration across network hardware, forwarding and operating system layers.
DANOS is initially based on AT&T’s “dNOS” software framework of an open, cost-effective and flexible alternative to traditional networking operating systems.
A first code release is expected the second half of 2018.
“We are pleased to welcome DANOS to The Linux Foundation community of open, collaborative innovation,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, The Linux Foundation. “DANOS will provide an open NOS framework that leverages existing open source resources and complementary platforms such as switches and white box routers. We invite others in the broader ecosystem to join the effort to accelerate innovation and creation of an industry-standard disaggregated NOS.”
“As far as we know, DANOS is an industry first: an open-source, carrier-grade operating system for wide area networks,” said John Medamana, Vice President, Packet Optical Network, AT&T. “DANOS is a milestone for us and the industry, and we’re excited to see how developers and other users implement and build upon it.”
“ONF has been a champion of disaggregation, white boxes and open source and in this regard, we are happy to see DANOS launched as a carrier-grade, open source network OS for white boxes,” said Guru Parulkar, Executive Director, ONF. “We are looking forward to DANOS and ONF’s recent open source platform Stratum, thin switch OS, working together.”
AT&T’s whitepaper on the dNOS framework is available here: http://about.att.com/content/dam/innovationblogdocs/att-routing-nos-open-architecture_FINAL%20whitepaper.pdf
