2013年4月23日 星期二

Built using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) building blocks

In recent years, building, maintaining, and evolving proprietary network systems for telecom-grade applications that are highly available and "always on" have become increasingly prohibitive from the perspective of cost, risk management, time to revenue, and so on.
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State of the industry
Wide adoption of several of these key standards has resulted in commercially viable COTS building blocks – hardware and software – that address various functional layers in a network-ready system quickly and cost effectively (Figure 1). This approach is being broadly employed by various industry players, and such platforms have been successfully deployed in networks worldwide. A few critical challenges, however, still remain:
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Figure 1: The communications industry is migrating towards vertically integrated platforms.
There is increasing industry recognition of these challenges, and key players are stepping forward to effectively address them.

Network Applications Platform
The CSPs' need to bring innovative services to market quickly and at a competitive cost creates a direct challenge for NEPs to provide telecom network elements that meet their requirements. Not only does the approach of using platforms that are built with field-proven COTS building blocks help NEPs save R&D expense and time, it enables them to focus their precious resources on revenue-generating applications and services.
Oracle Corporation has been actively pursuing product programs designed to help NEPs transition to this approach. The Oracle Network Applications Platform (ONAP) is a pre-integrated, pre-tested engineered system using hardware and software assets designed to meet mission-critical communications network workloads. These COTS assets, that have already been deployed and tested in numerous commercial deployments in a variety of markets, span all layers of the platform – hardware, storage, Operating System (OS),virtualization, service availability, management, and a host of application services (Figure 2).
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Figure 2: The Oracle Network Applications Platform provides high levels of availability by leveraging industry-standard COTS assets at all levels of the stack.

ONAP is designed with the objective of addressing the functional and non-functional requirements of a wide set of network and back office applications, and others. The extensible architecture of ONAP has been designed to provide resident applications with 5-nines and higher availability, end-to-end management, scalability, and reliability – all supported in multiple operating environments.
ONAP's architecture is designed to enable customers to maximize the value of their investments by leveraging a carrier-grade platform on which they can swiftly develop and deploy applications. It also provides optimized performance, High Availability (HA), and seamless integrated operations management for mission-critical deployments. ONAP accomplishes this by leveraging best-of-suite COTS technologies, including extensive use of the various services defined by the SAF to ensure continuous service availability of applications hosted on the platform.
The key tenets of the ONAP architecture are summarized here.
Unified Availability
ONAP implements a comprehensive availability management framework that, along with several supporting services, provides end-to-end availability lifecycle management for all layers of the system. ONAP Unified Availability monitors the health and availability of the platform infrastructure services, which affect application availability. This  to a cohesive availability management  that encompasses the entire stack – from hardware to the application – and drives the highest level of application availability. This is a unique approach that brings together technologies that offer carrier-grade service availability to telecom and IT applications. These technologies form the basis of two COTS products that have been field-hardened in a large number of telecom and enterprise applications worldwide for several years.
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Through the use of the SAF Application Interface Specification (AIS)Availability Management Framework (AMF) and Cluster Membership (CLM) services, these two powerful products have been integrated within ONAP and offer critical functionality to ensure data and session integrity in a wide variety of network and back office applications.
ONAP abstracts the underlying platform from the application developers by providing a set of SAF AIS Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Clusterware interfaces as part of a Software Development Kit (SDK).
Unified Management
ONAP brings forth a set of COTS technologies and products, each with sophisticated functionality at various layers of the integrated stack. Managing such an integrated platform can be complex and challenging. ONAP implements a comprehensive management framework and related services that provide a consistent and unified approach to managing the entire platform – from hardware to the application(s) and the intervening middleware, Platform Service Modules (PSMs), application services, and so on. The Unified Management capability leverages field-proven technologies and products that have been widely deployed to provide management solutions to a variety of applications. Unified Management covers a broad set of management requirements of the platform
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Extensible architecture
ONAP has been designed and implemented to meet the requirements of a wide variety of network and network-facing applications. Whereas the base platform addresses the common requirements of such applications, ONAP also provides the ability to optionally integrate other technologies and solutions from Oracle, as well as third-party databases, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), application services, and protocol suites, for example. Such solutions, referred to by ONAP as PSMs, become native to ONAP and enjoy the benefits of Unified Availability and Unified Management once integrated.
Operating environments
ONAP offers four major operating environments – an OS and CPU combination that exposes a particular Application Binary Interface (ABI) for use by the overlaying application
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Virtualization of the operating environment is provided through the use of Oracle Virtual Server (OVS), which offers a broad set of capabilities:
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Vertical Integration
ONAP's uniqueness is due to yet another important factor. Other than any potential optional third-party PSMs, Oracle owns the intellectual property of the ONAP engineered COTS system, offering several advantages to the user
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Integration Development Kit
Integration of applications on ONAP is supported through a set of APIs provided by an Integration Development Kit (IDK). These API expose various capabilities of Unified Availability and Unified Management for use by the application integrator. This kit also provides tools necessary to create software releases for ONAP deployment. Once the overall configuration of the system is determined, the IDK is used to create an appliance ready for intended deployment.
A final word
In recent years the COTS hardware and software industry has made significant strides towards building and providing products that meet the functionality, availability, manageability, and scalability requirements of demanding applications such as telecom. Network elements built through integration of such components have become viable and are being deployed in networks worldwide. However, this approach is not without its challenges – NEPs and CSPs following this path often have to manage multiple suppliers, coordinate their developments, and navigate disparate and complex support structures. By adopting a platform such as ONAP, NEPs and CSPs can leverage the ecosystem effectively and save cost, time, and effort required to build or integrate such systems in-house.




refer to : http://xtca-systems.com/articles/engineered-cots-network-systems/

2013年4月9日 星期二

The using of power outlets: tough call!


Industrial PC, in vehicle pc, Embedded pc,












The main gaming challenges of using power outlets to connect devices in the home include a lack of industry specifications, multiple sources of electric noise, and difficulty passing through phases in the home. HomePlug technology has overcome these challenges by creating specifications with advanced, optimized algorithms that are realized in semiconductor technology. HomePlug AV addresses these shortcomings – and stay tuned for the HomePlug AV2 standard currently in development.
The reliability of a wired gaming  connection for high-speed connections has always been an advantage of HomePlug power line networking, and HomePlug AV and HomePlug AV2 include improvements to achieve nearly 100 percent coverage. Everyone enjoys the mobility of a wireless connection, but when a consumer is running a demanding application such as streaming video or online gaming, the wireless signal often isn’t strong enough. Appliances such as HDTVs, computers, or gaming consoles are most often stationary in the home, so HomePlug provides a perfect solution to deliver a gaming  broadband-strength network to these always-plugged-in devices simply via a nearby electrical outlet.


refer to:http://industrial-embedded.com/articles/plug-and-play-homeplug-homeplug-powerline-alliance/

2013年4月3日 星期三

The importance of the AFE

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Another function of the AFE is to filter unwanted frequency ranges from the sensor, for example, to satisfy the Nyquist limit or to remove a DC offset. This embedded noise must be removed before the analog signal is converted to embedded digital. The AFE must employ low-pass filter circuitry to block out high-frequency noise and/or employ high-pass circuits to remove lower-frequency noise.
A second function of the AFE is to convert signals from one signal type to another. For example, typical sensors output a voltage, but some output a current. The MCU ADC circuits do not accept current inputs, so such currents have to be converted to voltages before going to the MCU. This current-to-voltage conversion is performed by the AFE circuit, called a transimpedance (I/V) circuit, which also amplifies the resulting voltage to levels usable by the MCU.
refer to: http://embedded-computing.com/articles/latest-afe-simplifies-interfacing-hundreds-sensors/#at_pco=cfd-1.0