June 2015
24
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YSTEMS
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Virtualization in broadband gateway
creates value-added service platform
By Stephan Pruecklmayer and Ananta Vedantam,
Lantiq
The broadband gateway
can be turned into a powerful
network hub for the smart home,
instead of a simple network pipe.
Virtualization, based on a powerful
new class of network processor,
is the key to dramatic improvements
in the capabilities of the gateway that
will allow carriers to serve as a central
provider of smart home services.
n
Today, telecom and cable companies (car-
riers) provide residential broadband access
to nearly 700 million customers worldwide.
While the number of customers for these ser-
vices is forecast to grow at single digit percent-
age rates through the decade, the emergence
of the smart home o ers a new opportunity to
market intelligent electronic devices and ser-
vices to consumers. However, wireline carriers
are not the only resellers targeting the smart
home. Broadband customers can choose from
a growing number of third-party providers for
equipment and value-added services. is can
lead consumers to view broadband service as
a commodity that is purchased based on price
alone, driving carriers to compete for a shrink-
ing share of residential costumer spending.
e advantage a carrier has is the currently
installed broadband customer premise equip-
ment (CPE). With the proliferation of tablets
and portable devices used to stream content
in homes, recent improvements to the CPE
have focused on optimizing distribution of
multiple media streams. Smart home services
– such as climate control and home energy
management, security and room-to-room
monitoring, and home automation – o er an
incremental market opportunity for carriers
that could be worth $10 billion or more in
new service revenue by 2017. To win that rev-
enue, carriers and their equipment suppliers
need to turn the CPE into the central server
of the smart home. is requires a system
with the exibility to e ectively support core
broadband access service, media streaming,
and new smart home service requirements.
Equipment providers need to deliver plat-
forms that can stream content seamlessly to
multiple client devices, provide robust device,
o er greater security levels with more e cient
processor usage and application management
capability, and achieve exceptional system sta-
bility while handling a large, heterogeneous
application load. A key capability for this new
generation gateway is virtualization, which
serves as the basis for true multi-application
operation. Virtualization is a process of run-
ning multiple operating systems and applica-
tions on a single, shared hardware resource
while maintaining isolation and security
between them. While it is possible to execute
virtualization in a system using so ware only,
this approach faces limitations in terms of
resource allocation (which can a ect perfor-
mance) and security. With its newest home
gateway network processor, Lantiq delivers
the hardware basis for secure, stable and high
performance virtualization. Hardware-based
virtualization creates two or more virtual
machines (VMs) that act as physically sepa-
rate central processing units (CPUs) or even
CPU clusters. To achieve this, the underly-
ing hardware must control access to system
memory and peripherals. A virtualized, smart
home capable gateway addresses a broad set
of requirements: Isolation between applica-
tions/services that protects each service such
that a crash of so ware running on one CPU
does not disrupt other services; data security
and integrity between the di erent services;
prioritization of resources between the virtual
entities; ability to securely deliver and turn
on/o add-on services from a remote loca-
tion; remote trouble shooting to reduce the
help desk tra c; and exibility for the user to
choose applications from third party suppli-
ers, e.g. an app store.
Hardware virtualization in CPE is imple-
mented by creating di erent partitions with
separated access rights and di erent operat-
ing systems. At minimum, the partition must
support one OS for the broadband access and
other telecom operations of a gateway with
a focus on stability and security. en a sec-
ond area, or even multiple, independent areas
can be de ned for smart home functionality.
An important aspect of one or more of the
independent area(s) is that they be designed
to accommodate applications (provided by
either the carrier or delivered as third-party
apps) that have much faster update cycles
than the core gateway functionality. Crit-
ical functional characteristics of hardware-
Figure 1. e Lantiq GRX350
network processor system-on-
chip combines multiple pro-
cessor cores, trusted execution
hardware and suite of resource
management and protocol
accelerators to support robust,
hardware managed virtualizati-
on and platform security.
