Ericsson's Smart Services Router to Offer Multi-Application Blades, Caching

Ericsson's next generation Smart Services Router (SSR) is on-target for introduction later this year, said Georges Antoun, Head of Product Area IP & Broadband. The platform, which is being developed at Ericsson's Silicon Valley R&D center, will offer a capacity of 16 Tbps per system and feature 20 slots with 400 Gbps full-duplex capacity each.



Ericsson's Smart Services Router is being designed to scale in several dimensions -- scalability in subscribers, scalability in bandwidth, scalability in signaling, and scalability in the number of applications.



The Smart Services Router (SSR) is being positioned as a "multi-application" platform for advanced services on both fixed access and broadband wireless access. Specific blades will deliver processing power for applications, including: video (caching), mobility (mobile gateway), business and residential services with powerful DPI and policy enforcement.



Ericsson said the SSR will handle the onslaught of video traffic by support uni-cast and multicast, by implementing intelligent subscriber policy management functionality, and by offering built-in CDN capabilities. Ericsson has a partnership project underway with Akamai, although product plans have not been disclosed.



The company expects that operators deploying the SSR will "recognize new revenue opportunities through rapid deployment value-added services and user experience optimization. They can also reduce operational costs through functional consolidation, unified management, and low energy consumption".



Some other items of note from last week's Ericsson Business Innovations Forum in Silicon Valley:





Ericsson demonstrated an OpenFlow-based "Split Architecture", where end-to-end MPLS paths are used for access aggregation. The goal of this research project, which leverages work underway at Stanford, is to separate the control and data planes so that lighter-weight, programmable switches can be used instead of routers. This demo used Ericsson's EDA 1500 and SEA20 platforms, along with a Tilera programmable softswitch. The Tilera platform leverages 64 cores and offers 50- 100 Gbps of capacity for handling 100k to 1 million flow entries. While OpenFlow has initially been directed at data center switching, Ericsson said future versions of the spec could be opened up for Metro applications and integration with MPLS.



Ericsson's Innova Program is seeing some early success. Ericsson Innova encourages employees to bring forth new ideas. The program rapidly provides the employees with development time and light funding. In the past few months, thousands of ideas have come, a few hundred have gotten approval, a few dozen will get serious development support, and perhaps a handful will make it to product status.




Ericsson is working with Stanford University on a "MobiSocial" project aimed at a new way to run social networking without giving up your privacy.http://www.ericsson.com