The telecom world is at the forefront of many industrial network, embedded computing and content management technical innovations. We all have seen the ads on TV, on-line and on our Blackberrys, iPhones and now our iPads about how this service or that service provides you with the latest in 3G, 4G; and stay tuned folks, 10G wireless communications. On top of these network advancements, you can add an explosion of advance audio and video content applications like: conferencing, call centers, interactive voice response (IVR) servers, media and signaling gateways.
It’s enough to make your head hurt figuring out how you’re going to meet the needs of so many new networks and the latest converged telephony solutions while still maintaining the older applications and networks all with the same or reduced hardware budget.
Telecom platform architecture hardware like AdvancedTCA (ATCA) certainly meets all of the technical challenges of the latest telecom applications, but at steep hardware and infrastructure costs. ATCA’s hardware platform “cousin” MicroTCA holds a lot of promise, but has some limitations in terms of the breadth of Telco cards available. CompactPCI certainly has proven itself over the years in these types of applications, but cPCI hardware tends to lack the hardware uniformity of ATCA and uTCA platforms.
So, what is the answer to this hardware dilemma?
Good ol’ edge card-based computing solutions offer a high degree of system scalability and flexibility at very attractive price points. For example, the Trenton TRC6001 6U rackmount computer shown below is built on the PICMG 1.3 system architecture.
Trenton TRC6001 Rackmount Computer
The TRC6001 system supports either eighteen PCI Express or sixteen PCI-X/PCI DSP-based rich media cards for converged telephony applications. As many as eighteen, full-length PCI Express DSP cards can be supported in the TRC6001 using Trenton’s BPX6806 backplane, and sixteen PCI-X/PCI version cards are supported by the BPX6571 backplane. There is one single board computer slot present on each backplane to manage traffic between DSP cards. Examples used in this system solution include the JXT single board computer or a Trenton MCX-series board.
The edge card computing architecture allows you to mix n’ match COTS board hardware to meet a wide variety of network and Telco content apps. The ability to choose different hardware to meet past, current and future telecommunication needs makes systems like the Trenton TRC6001 an ideal hardware platform choice in converged media applications.
