Broadcom Targets Virtual Customer Premise Equipment

Broadcom introduced a system-on-a-chip (SoC) for the virtual customer premise equipment (vCPE) market.

Broadcom’s BCM88312 is an integrated and programmable device that can be connected to the operator’s network to deliver vCPE services.  It can be managed over OpenFlow, based on Broadcom’s OpenFlow-Data Plane Abstraction (OF-DPA) layer framework, thereby extending OF-DPA from the infrastructure core all the way to the business CPE access.

By offering this remote management and virtualization capability, Broadcom said network operators will gain the ability to decouple services from the physical hardware and run them on standard compute infrastructure, thus facilitating faster time-to-market and enabling customers to customize their equipment based on evolving requirements.

“One of the greatest challenges facing service providers is how to offer new services to their business customers rapidly and more cost effectively,” said Ed Redmond, Broadcom Vice President, Compute and Connectivity Group. “By decoupling service delivery and activation from the physical infrastructure, Broadcom’s integrated and programmable device enables carriers to turn-up services as virtual network functions (VNFs) without the need for manual provisioning and expensive truck rolls.”

Key features:

• Scalable, Integrated and Programmable
• Integrated Dual Cortex A9 cores @ 1.2GHZ
• Integrated 8-port GE Switch, Serdes, and copper PHYs
• Programmable Processor Forwarding Engine
• Support for 1588v2 / SyncE
• Low-power at 3.5W typical

The Broadcom BCM88312 is sampling with production-ready carrier-class reference code, including support for:

• MEF-Compliant E-Line Service, based on MPLS/MPLS-TP Forwarding
• ETY OAM (802.3ah), Ethernet OAM (Y1731), BHH / MPLS-TP Fast OAM(G.8113.1)
• G.8131 MPLS Linear Protection 

http://www.broadcom.com

• In March 2014, Broadcom first announced its OpenFlow Data Plane Abstraction (OF-DPA) v1.0 specification, software and API — an openly published implementation of physical switch hardware pipeline abstraction for the Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF) OpenFlow 1.3.1 Switch. The OF-DPA v1.0 specification, software and API can be used to implement network virtualization, multi-tenant networks and traffic engineering with higher scale and performance.  The software defines a pipeline that contains multiple tables, each table containing multiple flow entries. The OpenFlow pipeline processing defines how packets interact with these tables. The OF-DPA v1.0 physical switch hardware pipeline abstraction is an implementation of the OpenFlow 1.3.1 Switch optimized for Broadcom StrataXGS Ethernet Switch devices.