Customer: Tier-1 global system integrator and supplier of mission-critical network solutions
Scope:
- Make the GSM-R wireless Access Network portfolio hardware agnostic based on Intel COTS Rack Mounted server
- Base Station Controller product must support IP backhaul and thus help operators to reduce their infrastructure investments
Solution:
Sasken was involved in the following:
- Architectural design and development of the Base Station Controller software as a virtual network function (VNF)
- Architectural design phase considered the legacy blade software as virtual blade/machine to minimize the risk and a design effort
- Introduction of the A over IP interface as per 3GPP specification
- Provided the software and hardware redundancy to achieve high availability
- Replaced the TDM based backhaul with IP based backhaul by replacing LAPD with SCTP, SS7 SIGTRAN (SS7oIP) for signaling &TRAU with RTP for user plane
Impact:
- Virtualized Base Station Controller with flexible and efficient deployment options
- Reduced hardware requirements by up to 80%
- Geo-redundancy features were enabled naturally
