Development Of Multi Service Provisioning Platform In Synchronous Digital Hierarchy Systems

This paper describes a development project whose goal was to design a new multi-service provisioning platform for SDH systems with integrated proprietary microwave line interfaces.The next-generation network elements are a fairly new bread of network elements based on the standard SDH equipment such as add-drop multiplexers, terminal multiplexers, and digital cross-connectors.Over the years, the expansion of packet-based data have made the producers add data-aware interfaces, such as Ethernet, SAN, DVB-SI and others, to the legacy equipment. A new type of products has been born.Protocols that enable an easy and efficient integration of packet-based systems in the predominant TDM transport networks are Generic Framing Procedure (GFP), Virtual Concatenation (VCAT) and Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS).The main part of the paper presents development of the MSSP and provides a further insight into the hardware subsystems of the central module, which in fact builds the main functionality of the whole system. Because of the cost and available resources related issues, we chose PM5337, an application specific integrated circuit, for the core of our MSPP system.The paper also describes the implemented software with an emphasis on open-source programs like embedded Linux for the operating system and Net-SNMP for management architecture. For the time being, SNMP is the most widely deployed and used protocol for network management. It allowed for integration of our products in a large network management system of the HP OpenView type. For the graphical user interface, we made use of the Java powerful features with which we were able to deploy the element management systems on a number of different host computers.Another feature implemented in the system, which is currently getting acceptance by other network element manufacturers, is the use of the IP protocol in data communication channels within SDH regeneration and multiplexer sections.