ENT Demonstrator
Ericsson Nikola Tesla demonstrator
The ENT demonstrator is a demonstrator from the telecommunication domain. The demonstrator represents a typical research and development challenge found in current telecommunication networks.
Traditionally, the telecommunications domain designed and built its network equipment and service delivery systems using vertical industry model – own expertise and resources were used to build the whole system from the ground up. This was time consuming and very expensive process. However, the result was a system whose main characteristics were performance, high availability and reliability. An exemplary traditional system is shown on the following picture. It is comprised of a multiprocessor system, 48 GB RAM and consumes 1500 W.
Recent intensive technology growth and the ever-more demanding market has put the telecommunications industry under a strong pressure to shorten their development cycles and launch new product into the market at a much faster rate and with reduced costs. This is the reason why the telecommunications domain is shifting from the vertical industry model toward a horizontal one – besides own expertise and resources, 3rd party commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) and hardware building blocks are used for building systems.
The telecommunications demonstrator investigates the possibility of integrating Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts with existing core network legacy systems. The idea of the demonstrator is to create a SOA-based extension of one of the telecommunications systems’ basic services – call control. Call control decodes addressing information and routes calls from one end point to another. Call control node is an exemplary core network legacy system which performs call control service in the network. The SOA-based extension supplements functionality of the call control node and provides added functionality as a service to the call control. The supplemented functionality, provided by the extension, is too complex to be implemented within the legacy systems that comprise the call control themselves.
The system used as the telecommunications demonstrator for validating the Q-ImPrESS method and tools consists of a set of Ericsson call control nodes. The first call control node represents an access network where a call is generated. The second call control node represents the core network which provides the basic service of call control (routes the call toward another end-point). The second call control node is extended with authentication, authorization and auditing (AAA) functionality. AAA functionality is implemented through the DIAMETER protocol, a widely accepted and standardized Internet protocol for AAA. There are proprietary solutions for the implementation of AAA functionality which function quite well if all of the used network equipment is from the same vendor. However, such proprietary solutions do not interoperate when the used network equipment is supplied from different vendors. On the other hand, an AAA solution based on standards, like DIAMETER, offers an advantage in terms of network equipment interoperability. A conceptual architecture of the demonstrator is shown on the following picture.
Non-legacy system implements DIAMETER functionality that extends existing functionalities of the call control. Therefore, non-legacy system acts as an external service to the legacy system. Since DIAMETER is a client-server based application system, non-legacy system consists of two corresponding parts: a client cluster and a server cluster. Clusters are comprised of common PCs running Linux operating system, and utilize OpenSAF, an open-source high-availability middleware. Each active node of the cluster has at least one corresponding redundant node for assuring reliability and high-availability of the overall non-legacy system. These sets of active and redundant nodes share the same virtual IP address.
The following movie presents the Ericsson Nikola Tesla demonstrator.
Recently we have begun modelling our demonstrator in the Q-ImPrESS tools. The following movie shows how our initial model looks like.
The model itself is downloadable from the following link.