China based ZTE Corporation has published a whitepaper on Built-in Blade in OLT (Optical Line Terminal Equipment), which the manufacturer claims as a first of its kind in the industry. The white paper introduces three typical application scenarios as well as the value of a built-in blade in OLT.
First Scenario
Large-traffic and low-latency accelerated video services including Access CDN, video cache, and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) acceleration.
Second Scenario
Fixed network access VNFs including vSTB (virtual Set-TopBox), vOMCI (virtual ONU Management and Control Interface), vRG (virtual Residential Gateway), BNG-U (Broadband Network Gateway User plane), and vFW (virtual Firewall).
Third Scenario
MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) applications including local cache and offload, energy saving and energy management, smart fence, indoor location and navigation, and information service management.
The design concept of the built-in blade in OLT includes the following three aspects:
Lightweight application: Built-in blade is pluggable in the OLT subrack, which effectively utilizes the existing resources of the OLT without extra footprint in equipment rooms. Built-in blade consumes less power and is easier to install than standalone blade servers. Meanwhile, built-in blade leverages state-of-the-art technologies such as lightweight SoC CPU and SSD to provide better forwarding performance, stronger I/O storage capability, and broader temperature adaptability.
Flexible configuration: Built-in blade uses the line card design concept. It can be flexibly configured and plugged like PON line cards. Meanwhile, the components of the built-in blade such as memory and hard disk can be configured flexibly. The coordination of multiple cards can expand the storage capacity, support linear expansion as per network application requirements, and upload different software as application to achieve different lightweight functions.
Independent management: The management of the OLT and the built-in blade is separated from each other. The OLT is managed by the EMS (Element Management System) and the built-in blade is managed by the PIM (Physical Infrastructure Manager) system. The built-in blade is included in the overall management system in compliance with ETSI NFVI (Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure) via the PIM to automate management and configuration. In hardware design, built-in blade can provide a bandwidth management channel and in-band management channel independent from that of the OLT
Built-in blade not only effectively makes use of the subrack, power supply and heat dissipation of the OLT, but also has network connections with the OLT, which enable them communicate with each other. Built-in blade consists of the components including
CPU, memory, SSD hard disk and interface module. The CPU mainly implements the general computation functions, the memory and the SSD hard disk implement video data storage and cache, and the interface module implements high-performance network forwarding and processing through programming. Built-in blade also provides independent interfaces including management, display and USB interfaces, and can independently connect the PIM management system and other NFVIs.
You can download the whitepaper from White Paper of Built-in Blade in OLT
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