What is relevance of software in Layer 0 – Layer 3 Transport Equipment?

Continuing from last week, today I will share some context on where to find the software in transport equipment. We will limit the discussion to L0-L3 equipment, as we already know that all equipment that are beyond L3, are essentially pieces of software running on servers. And we know that majority of the “Apps” or applications reside in cloud and consume hardware resources in a dynamic fashion as they scale up and down to meet the consumer demand. There are nuances and specifics of implementation even in these layers and depending on how the applications are designed, custom hardware may help accelerate the response or boost performance but today we will limit ourselves to the telecom infrastructure layer.

Let us examine of transport equipment, all the way up to a router and try and understand various blocks that make it work.

Any equipment consists of Hardware and Software (piece of code), some code is tightly integrated with the hardware and some is not.

There is two types of hardware,

• Hardware that is linked with I/O (input /output) or the line/client signals and local switching and protection functions. This piece of hardware is linked to Line adaptation, forwarding and protection services.
• Hardware that essentially is a server running a control software, this software is responsible for signalling, setting up of services, management functions and various “scenario management” activities. This piece of hardware essentially consists of compute, memory and storage components and is a server on a blade.

There are also two types of software,

• First that runs on the I/O and Switching Hardware, this is more intrinsic piece of software and is linked or attached to this hardware and essentially is an extension of the physical hardware.
• The second piece of software is the come that consists of two major components, namely control and services. The control layer extends beyond a single piece of equipment is a more a network function, some of it can be centralized as well. The service instances are also not specific to the hardware they are defined on. This piece of software can run over a COTS hardware (Commercial Off The Shelf), like server blades.

Next week, we will compare and contrast some equipment to see where we have a scope to move to more software based approach and use “OPEN” interfaces and make a difference to a telecom infra layer.

Stay tuned for more next week.