At Mobile World Congress 2008, which will be held February 11-14 in Barcelona, RAD Data Communications, a leader in supplying innovative solutions for the transport of data, voice and signaling traffic in cellular and mobile applications, will unveil its fully "future-proof" ACE-3205 cell site gateway.
"RAD's ACE-3205 cell site gateway is triply unique," says Gaby Junowicz, Director of Business Development at RAD Data Communications.
First, the ACE-3205 is the only cellular backhauling device on the market that supports 2G, 3G, HSPA, and IP NodeB traffic, and backhauls it simultaneously over ubiquitous SHDSL and ADSL2+ links. Second, it reduces transport costs by performing statistical multiplexing, aggregation of multiple types of traffic, and Abis and data optimization. Third, the "future proof" ACE-3205 paves the way to an all-IP RAN by employing pseudowire technology and by supporting the new IP-enabled RAN elements. A simple software upgrade will enable it to support VDSL2.
The ACE-3205 decouples rising traffic demand from transport costs by leveraging the use of affordable and widely deployed DSL infrastructure, but maintains appropriate QoS (Quality of Service) parameters for each service stream. A hybrid approach implemented in the ACE-3205 yields an additional cost reduction by diverting delay sensitive traffic, such as voice, to a link with a high QoS, while the remainder of the aggregated traffic is delivered over best-effort service streams.
"Looking to the future, mobile transport architects are planning their migration path to a converged IP backbone," Junowicz notes. "Pseudowire technology is the great enabler of this transformation," he adds. "RAD has lead the industry’s pseudowire standardization efforts since we became the first vendor to introduce a pseudowire gateway almost a decade ago," he continues. "RAD, moreover, has been among the first vendors to develop solutions for synchronization and clock distribution, and is fully committed to comply with the IEEE’s emerging 1588 v.2 encapsulation and Synchronous Ethernet standards." Working opposite a DSLAM, the ACE-3205 also maintains synchronization based on NTR (Network Time Reference).
"The ACE-3205 probably packs more into one box than any other cell site gateway available in the market, Junowicz states. Even though it accommodates up to sixteen E1/T1s and multiple DSL links, it is just 1U high and 19 inches wide. This small form factor facilitates its integration even in cramped street cabinets. This yields addition significant savings in Capex and Opex.
The other products in RAD's suite of cellular backhaul solutions being exhibited at Mobile World Congress 2008 include the ACE-3600 multiservice aggregation unit, supporting pseudowire transport of ATM over packet-based networks, the LA-130 cell-site gateway for delivering 2G, 3G and HSPA over xDSL, and the Gmux-2000 carrier-class compressed voice trunking gateway.
"What all of these different devices have in common," concludes Junowicz, "is their ability to optimize cellular backhaul bandwidth from 2G, 3G and 3.5G cell sites and, using pseudowire emulation technology, hand it off to an Ethernet, MPLS or IP transport network, thus enabling the migration to an all-IP radio access infrastructure."
