The Operator's Challenge
In today's competitive telecommunications environment, telecom operators continually look for ways to retain and increase subscribers by offering innovative, revenue-generating services. Their challenge is to offer new services over next-generation infrastructures, such as fixed wireless, DSL, and cable, while preserving their investment in existing circuit-switched equipment.
Remote digital terminals (RDT) use digital loop carrier (DLC) protocols GR-303 and V5.2 to communicate with Central Office (CO) switches. By utilizing these standard protocols, new network access gateways can easily interface with CO switches as well, allowing operators to reap the rewards of new generation services with minimal impact to the installed network infrastructure. By supporting proven protocol stacks within access gateways, telecom operators are not only able to deploy innovative services quickly, creating new sources of revenue from their existing customer base, but also offer converged voice, data, and video services over a single network.
The Communications Equipment Provider's Challenge
To help operators meet customer demand for converged services, network equipment providers must be able to respond quickly to emerging market trends. Partnering with industry-leading suppliers of platforms and protocol stacks enables communications equipment providers to focus internal resources on the value-added host applications that distinguish them in the competitive marketplace — and get to market faster.
The challenge for communications equipment providers is to choose the best underlying technology from the right partners. Signaling protocol standards have been long established in the telecommunications industry. In reality, however, many variants exist for different switches, countries, and even regions. Equipment manufacturers must choose partners who understand these interoperability challenges and have demonstrated solutions that work in the real world — and around the world. Some of the richest market opportunities are often in developing countries where telecommunications networks are being built out at a high rate. The right platform and protocol partners can smooth the global sales, marketing, and deployment process by providing solutions that have been tested in countries around the globe.
Selecting the right partners can also provide communications equipment suppliers with a more complete technology solution. By acquiring DLC protocol software and hardware that have already been integrated and tested, the equipment supplier is unburdened of software integration efforts and free to concentrate on the value added, revenue-generating services that they can offer to operators.
A Comprehensive Development Platform
Together, NMS Communications and Aztek Engineering offer a tightly integrated hardware and software toolkit for developing systems with digital loop carrier interfaces. NMS and Aztek have collaborated to deliver a set of APIs and physical libraries designed to facilitate the integration of NMS' Open Access CG Series platforms with Aztek's Access303,™ Exchange303,™ and AV5® protocol stacks. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: NMS/Aztek solution architecture
NMS Platforms
The NMS CG Series is a scalable, high-performance development platform for IP telephony solutions. This product family has been developed from the ground up to address packet-intensive convergence applications. In contrast to competitive IP telephony products, CG Series products are purpose-built to offer low-latency media streaming.
The CG hardware platforms are all supported by NMS' rich and flexible software development environment, Natural Access. Natural Access is a modular runtime and development environment for NMS' voice, fax, and call processing applications. It provides a simple and consistent standard application programming interface (API) for integrating and presenting media and telecommunication capabilities to an application. Natural Access standard features include telephony call control, voice record and playback, tone detection and generation, industry-standard H.100/H.110 switching support, and hot swap for CompactPCI. Natural Access is extensible, seamlessly integrating fax, voice over IP, and speech recognition products to the environment.
Aztek Protocol Stacks
Access303, Aztek's complete GR-303 solution, enables gateways and RDTs (Remote Digital Terminals) in the North American market to interface to the Central Office. Access303 provides a robust, complete TMC/EOC (timeslot management channel/embedded operations channel) solution to the GR-303 specification. More than just an adaptation of standard protocols, Access303's modularity, portability, and integrated tools reduce development time by making integration into new RDTs fast, simple, and reliable.
Exchange303 is Aztek's solution for the IDT (Integrated Digital Terminal) or switch side of the GR-303 interface. Providing both the TMC and EOC, Exchange303 allows next-generation soft switches to interface to the wide variety of RDTs deployed in the access network.
The AV5 software suite is designed specifically to meet the unique requirements of access network equipment in the international market. Its modular design scales to specific system requirements and protects against obsolescence. Fully supporting the V5.1, V5.2, 1st Edition and 2nd Edition ETSI standards to interface to the local exchange, AV5 cuts time to market, reduces development risk, and lowers development costs.
Aztek provides fully developed protocol stacks and engineering services to ease the integration effort. Every Aztek protocol stack is backed by its own experienced engineering team to ensure the best support and market driven enhancements.
A Powerful Partnership
NMS and Aztek deliver communications equipment providers the tools they need to quickly and easily write applications that employ Aztek's protocol stacks running on NMS' telecommunications interface platforms. For example, communications equipment providers can offer operator access gateway solutions that support voice-over-cable networks and connect to the existing PSTN, bringing new services into the legacy network. (See Figure 2.) Using proven GR-303 and V5.2 protocols allows telecom operators to quickly integrate the gateway into their networks.
Figure 2: Voice over cable
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NMS and Aztek technologies also allow equipment providers to offer solutions that help operators enter new markets. Access gateways that can transport voice over fixed wireless, for example, allow operators to bring new (or first-ever) services to subscribers in remote areas. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3: Voice over wireless local loop (VoWLL)
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Developers may purchase the platform products from NMS and license the GR-303 and V5.2 protocol stacks from Aztek. The APIs, physical libraries, and a demo application are available from the NMS web site. Technical support and global approvals services are also available from NMS.
About Aztek Engineering, Inc.
Aztek Engineering, headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, is an internationally recognized telecommunications engineering firm that for over two decades has developed, marketed, licensed, and supported telecommunications products and services. Aztek has provided product development solutions to customers and custom hardware and software engineering services. Aztek has expertise in a broad range of areas including: circuit switching, packet switching, high availability, wireless, broadband access, and VoIP. Off-the-shelf protocol solutions include ETSI (ITU) V5 AN, GR-303 RDT (Remote Digital Terminal) and IDT (Integrated Digital Terminal), TR08 RT, and ATMF BLES/ELCP (Broadband Loop Emulation Service) CO and CP. With customers worldwide, Aztek understands firsthand what it takes to deploy a successful product.With expertise ranging from legacy circuit-switched equipment to next-generation network applications such as VoIP, ATM, and wireless networks, Aztek is an Access Network technology company with an international reputation for the highest quality and uncompromising commitment to the customer. Visit www.aztek-eng.com or call +1 303 786 9100 for more information.
Aztek Engineering
2477 55th Street Suite 202
Boulder, CO 80301-2835 USA
phone: 303 786-9100
fax: 303 786-9190
email: aztekinfo@aztek-eng.com