Integrated Multi-core Software Solution for Packet Forwarding

In today's highly competitive broadband market, the performance of a network element and its ability to efficiently handle massive amounts of multimedia data packets can have a direct effect on the overall end user experience. Service providers are looking to network equipment providers to solve capacity challenges and to help deliver the quality of service required to keep customers. How fast equipment providers move to optimize their products for performance can be the difference between success and failure.

Multi-core acceleration solutions are quickly being designed into products throughout the network. Equipment in the core, edge, and access are taking advantage of the many benefits acceleration capabilities offer to improve performance and deliver more value. Wind River Network Acceleration Platform delivers a packet acceleration solution designed with the flexibility and scalability your product needs for success today and in next-generation networks.

Wind River Network Acceleration Platform delivers Gigabit Ethernet wire-speed performance for network infrastructure equipment using multi-core technologies. The platform is a comprehensive, integrated bundle of Wind River's industry-leading multi-core ready run-time technologies. It comes standard with control plane operating system support—Wind River Linux or VxWorks—and data plane acceleration software, including a fast real-time bare metal executive and high-performance networking software. The platform also includes a lightweight hypervisor to load and configure individual cores and to provide abstraction of system resources. The networking-specific software stack includes IPv4/IPv6 packet forwarding protocols optimized for specific multi-core processors.

Platform Highlights

Wind River Network Acceleration Platform is designed to provide linear performance scalability. As more cores are dedicated to the data plane, packet throughput performance increases proportionately. This is an important contrast to implementations that are limited by bus, memory, or other resource constraints.

While symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) plays an important role in multi-core systems, the packet processing performance curve in an SMP configuration can flatten after only a few cores, yielding diminishing returns as more system resources are allocated to networking tasks. Wind River's asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) technologies provide a clean separation of control plane and data plane functions, which enables greater efficiency of multiple processing cores. The data plane cores provide excellent scalability while the control plane is freed from the burden of packet processing. The platform offers flexibility to configure the allocation of cores to the control or data planes to meet a wide range of networking applications.

Platform Benefits

1. Breakthrough performance and competitive differentiation
   High-performance platform software from which to build more competitive products
• 21 million packets per second throughput
• Five times the forwarding performance of a native Linux stack

2. Time-to-market advantage
   Comprehensive, integrated software platform, from one vendor, optimized to maximize the performance capabilities of the leading multi-core processors
• Control plane operating system and inter-communication software
• Data plane acceleration engine and networking technologies
• Lightweight hypervisor

3. Reduced risk
   Integrated development tools environment with comprehensive prototyping, simulation, debugging, system analysis, and test capabilities
• Backed by the industry leader of embedded multi-core software—one vendor, one point of contact
• Global customer support
• Migration and optimization design services a phone call away

4. Cost reduction
   Consolidation of control plane and data plane applications into one system
• Multi-core architecture supporting processors with two to 32 cores
• Multiple control and data plane applications consolidated into one system
• Development efficiencies achieved through integrated platform approach