Accelerate the Wireline Network Transformation with FPGAs
Why Choose Intel® FPGAs?
Intel FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) provide flexibility, high-performance computing capabilities, and adaptability to support various communication protocols and address many of today's bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications.
Intel Agilex® FPGAs' performance leadership, supporting tools, and solutions enable a higher level of system integration for wireline communication infrastructure platforms.
To accelerate the time to market, Intel provides a wide array of intellectual property (IP), reference designs, and complete off-the-shelf partner solutions.
Optical Transport
Optical Transport in the Internet and the Core of 5G Network
Intel® FPGAs provide the foundation for building highly efficient transport solutions with capacities from 100 Gbps all the way up to and beyond 1Tbps.
The FPGAs have built-in ('hardened') functional blocks for e.g. forward error correction (FEC) in networking protocols like Ethernet, Fibre Channel and FlexO/FlexE.
Intel and Intel partners have a large library of (soft) intellectual property (IP) cores for OTN, and can provide complete ready-made OTN/FlexO/FlexE solutions to decrease time-to-market and development risk for system vendors.
Key Application Domains
- Metro Optical Networks, that interconnect telco offices / DCs, customer premises networks, and larger enterprises.
- Optical infrastructure for Fronthaul / Midhaul / Backhaul networks of 3G / 4G / 5G mobile networks and for connection of PON networks to the network core.
- Dedicated Data Center Interconnect networks for linking together data centers.
Generic Server Layer for Client Services
The Optical Transport Network is standardized by International Telecommunications Union-Telecommunications (ITU-T). The main protocol, OTN, is specified in recommendation G.709.
A key characteristic of the optical transport network is its ability to aggregate multiple client signals, which may be of different protocols, on a single optical line signal while keeping the individual client signals (including their synchronization, if necessary) completely independent. The transport network can provide 50msec protection switch times against network failures. The transport network can also provide low-latency encryption of services.
Intel® Technology for Optical Transport
Intel® FPGAs are ideal for implementation of line cards in optical transport systems.
The figure illustrates how Intel FPGAs can implement the core part of the functionality of a line-card in an optical transport system.
The key advantages of Intel's technology are as follow:
- FPGAs are long life time (re)programmable components that secures the network investment by allowing remote change / update of functionality as networking standards change and evolve.
- Intel FPGAs support up to 144 transceivers with the ability to reconfigure protocol, transmission rate, and NRZ/PAM4 modulation scheme at any point in time.
- Intel has a wide range of ready-made intellectual property (IP) cores and an eco-system that can be used by customers to enhance time to market.
Network Functions Virtualization
NFV
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has been the focus of the Communications Service Providers (CoSPs) as the COTS software programmable with configurable hardware technology to improve total cost of ownership, flexibility in deployment with enhanced services depending on customer demands.
Intel has teamed up with OEMs, Telco Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs), and Virtual Network Function (VNF) partners to work in lock step with the Intel® Architecture (IA) based NFV solution offerings to create a scalable, open-source based interoperable NFV platform components that enhance the performance of the overall offering at 100G+ network function bandwidth needs, specifically for virtual Broadband Network Gateways (vBNG) and virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) solutions. These VNFs can also be paired with security as an accelerated function as well.
Network Security
End-to-End Security
Whether it is data in flight or at rest, security throughout the communications spectrum has become a baseline requirement, provisioned through industry-standard network security protocols such as MACsec and IPsec.
These requirements can pose challenges in network security: from bump-in-the-wire VNF acceleration (CPU offload) in the DC cloud, to firewall/DPI appliances at the gateway, to embedded line-card storage engines in the enterprise.
Intel offers full-turnkey MACsec and IPsec soft-IP FPGA solutions, each with a baseline feature set that is typically relevant to most end user applications.
Networking
Intel enables the rapid deployment of turnkey solutions for Networking with DPDK compatible IPs, which showcase the abilities of the FPGA to build cutting-edge terabit rate feature-rich networking functions. Intel has internally developed and partner enabled Algorithmic TCAM, Deep packet inspection, traffic management, and NPU replacement IPs that enable wide applicability on networking control and data planes. Intel is aligned with the Open networking standards ecosystem and has a clear plan to be able to deploy P4 enabled networking IPs, which spur innovation of efficient and rapidly deployable network features that Communications service providers require the telecom equipment manufactures to support flexibly across software and hardware.
Need More Information?
Contact us to learn more about how Intel FPGAs can help with your wireline applications.