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Knowledge Management

B u s i n e s s / Te c h n i c a l

Enabling Mobility in WiMAX Networks

This white paper discusses the following: The evolution of the WiMAX standard The various deployment scenarios of the WiMAX technology Role of the ASN Gateway in WiMAX mobility Complexities involved in developing an ASN Gateway WiMAX services provided by Aricent

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Aricent 2006. All rights reserved.

No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, including photocopying, reprinting or recording, for any purpose, without the express written permission of Aricent.

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Aricent
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Contents

1. Introduction to WiMAX (IEEE 802.16)........................................................................................................................................4 2. Achieving Mobility in WiMAX: The ASN Gateway................................................................................................................4
2.1 Mobility: A Growing Necessity..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................4 2.2 The ASN Gateway: Providing Mobility in WiMAX Networks...................................................................................................................................................................................5 2.3 ASN Gateway Development: Challenges.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................5

3. Developing a WiMAX ASN Gateway...........................................................................................................................................7 4. Summary............................................................................................................................................................................................9 5. Acronyms...........................................................................................................................................................................................9 6. References.........................................................................................................................................................................................9

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Introduction

1. Introduction to WiMAX (IEEE 802.16)

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), a last mile broadband wireless standard, was created in April 2002 by a consortium of leading wireless access equipment vendors to facilitate the industry-wide acceptance and implementation of IEEE 802.16 and European Telecommunications Standards Institutes (ETSI) HiperMAN standards. The standard offers a wireless alternative for tradition wired technologies such as ATM, Digital Subscribers Line (DSL), and T1 by providing non-line-of-sight last mile broadband access. The proliferation of Wireless LANs is driving the demand for wireless broadband connectivity, which 802.16 can fulfill by providing long range, outdoor connections back to the Service Provider. Operators and Service Providers shall utilize the 802.16 standard to provide fat pipe capabilities for delivering affordable last-mile broadband access to millions of residential and enterprise users across the globe. The following table lists the various features of the 802.16, 802.16a, and 802.16e standards:
802.16 Completed Spectrum Channel Conditions Bit Rate December 2001 10-66 GHz Only line-of-sight 32-134 Mbps in 28 MHz channel bandwidth 802.16a January 2003 <11 GHz Non line-of-sight Up to 75 Mbps in 20 MHz channel bandwidth OFDM 256 sub-carriers, QPSK, 16QAM, and 64QAM Fixed, as well as portable Scalable from 1.5 to 20 MHz 7-10 km max.; range 50 km 802.16e Mid 2004 <6 GHz Non line-of-sight Up to 15 Mbps in 5 MHz channel bandwidth Same as 802.16a Nomadic portable Same as 802.16a with uplink subchannels 2-5 km

wireless Service Providers to provide differentiated levels of service to customers according to their contracted service-level agreements. The MAC layer has also been greatly enhanced to incorporate concepts, such as Grant-Request mechanism and Dynamic Burst Profiling, leading to better utilization of the shared channel and available radio codes.

WiMAX Base Station Internet / PSTN

Illustration 1: 802.16 - Broadband in the last mile

Modulation QPSK, 16QAM, and 64QAM Mobility Channel Bandwidth Typical Cell Radius Fixed 20, 25, and 28 MHz 2-5 km

2. Achieving Mobility in WiMAX: The ASN Gateway

2.1 Mobility: A Growing Necessity
The introduction of the 802.16e WiMAX flavor is creating new markets for mobile broadband services. Abilities of the 802.16e standard to provide seamless mobility to end users in their homes, offices, and during transit, are spurring the demand for innovative mobile services. Users can now take advantage of complex IP-based data-intensive applications while traveling at vehicular speeds. This is made possible by IP-specific optimizations of 802.16 and its built-in support for high-speed handoffs. Mobile customers shall now be able to download full-length DVD-quality movies quickly or host multi-party video-conferencing sessions from their WiMAXenabled handheld devices. Regardless of the deployment of this IP-based version of WiMAX, it is clear that 802.16e is providing a strong mobility platform to help accelerate convergence. Many Carriers and Service Providers are adopting Mobile WiMAX to enable them to sustain business growth, attract new customers, and increase ARPU. The Telecom industrys faith in this new technology is reflected in the decision of leading chip vendors to invest heavily into the manufacturing of miniaturized 802.16e chipsets. Economies of scale are expected to drive down prices once 802.16e chipsets are manufactured on a large scale. Soon, miniature 802.16e implementations are expected to find their way into most laptops, PCs, and handheld devices. The 4

Table 1: Evolution of the 802.16 standard The 802.16 standard provides Carrier-grade performance in terms of robustness and the Quality of Service (QoS). A completely new grounds-up design approach allows WiMAX to deliver services over a scalable, long-range communication path. Early 802.16 configurations make use of the point-to-multipoint approach with 802.16 Base Stations communicating with their peers and other subscriber stations (located in offices and homes). The Physical layer of the 802.16 utilizes Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technology, which reduces interference and hence increases the cell radius and coverage area of this standard. Using OFDM, WiMAX is able to achieve optimal throughput and non line-of-sight performance within a cell. To support time-sensitive, low-latency voice and video applications, the 802.16 specification supports robust security features and guaranteed QoS. Voice service can be either traditional Time Division Multiplexed (TDM) voice or Voice over IP (VoIP). With QoS support, 802.16 enables

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growing need for 802.16 mobility and the strong market pull are encouraging wide-scale deployments of 802.16e infrastructure. With this, mobility-related issues, such as handover, routing, and security, are becoming increasingly important.

2.2 The ASN Gateway: Providing Mobility in WiMAX Networks

ASN Gateway Legend
Control Data Path Signaling Path Intercepted Signaling Path Signaling Plane SigASN R4 ASN Gateway

Gateway is to build high-speed data handling capabilities into the system. This performance-oriented approach lends itself to the use of dedicated packet-processing hardware, such as NPs, ASICs, or FPGAs. High-speed (data) packet-processing functionalities, such as data classification, packet forwarding, traffic bi-casting, GRE tunneling, and routing, need to be implemented on the hardware. Performance of the entire ASN Gateway depends on the Fast Path implementation. Therefore, efficient design and coding are important factors in an ASN Gateway. In addition, each vendors NP has its own set of specialized programming languages and tools. All these factors increase the complexity of design and development of the ASN Gateway. Mobility-related issues are equally important and developers need to implement features, such as Admission Control, Authentication & Security, IP Mobility, Handoffs, Bi-casting, Buffering, Location Update & Paging, and Address Allocation & Management. Complex nodes, such as the ASN Gateway, need to support a multitude of Interfaces, such as R3, R4, and R6, and therefore are required to support various protocols. Some typical WiMAX-specific protocols include R6 Authentication Relay and key distribution protocol, R6 Data Path Establishment Protocol, R6 Radio Resource Management Protocol, and R6 Location & paging control. Other datacom protocols that need to be supported include Mobile IP for mobility, DHCP for address allocation, IGMP for multicast support, PKM, and IKE for security and so on. Subsequent to the Fast and Slow Path implementations, overall system integration and testing issues assume importance. Processing on the Fast Path is closely tied to the corresponding controlling entities on the Control Plane, thus requiring immaculate coordination between the two Planes. Again, NP-specific knowledge becomes essential. Complex test setups need to be created to test the various functionalities of the integrated solution. During the entire development process, multiple types of testing are employed to ensure maximum module and code coverage, and to identify and resolve bugs in the early stages. Thus, Feature, Conformance, Regression, Performance, and End-to-End testing have to be performed. Another important component in the overall system is the Network and Element Management module whose typical functionality includes shelf and user management, configuration and fault management, CLI & SNMP interface support, and so on. When deployed in the network, the ASN Gateway need to interface with multiple interfaces provided by multiple vendors. Some of these interfaces include the R3 interface to connect to the AAA and the HA servers, the R4 interface to communicate with other ASN Gateways, and

R3c

AAA

R6 MSS BS Fast Path Engine

R3b HA

Illustration 2: Placement of the ASN Gateway in the WiMAX network With the aforementioned considerations, the WiMAX Forum recently released a set of specifications defining a new Mobility node, called the Access Service Network (ASN) Gateway. In the WiMAX architecture, the ASN Gateway typically resides at the Operators premise and connects to multiple WiMAX Base Stations. The Node interfaces with other network elements, such as Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) servers, Home Agents, and Domain Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers to provide seamless mobility to end users. OEMs and Operators planning to provide next-generation WiMAX-enabled mobile services to their customers will need to incorporate ASN Gateways into their existing networks. However, implementation of 802.16e ASN Gateways presents its own unique set of challenges. Supporting data rates of the order of hundreds of Gbps calls for a Network Processor (NP), ASIC, or an FPGA-based design approach. Several standards-based protocols also need to be supported. Security and authentication become important issues. Strong integration and testing experience is required to inter-work and validate the implemented functionality. The following section outlines some of the key challenges faced by telecom equipment vendors while implementing the ASN Gateway.

2.3 ASN Gateway Development: Challenges

The primary challenge faced by developers while implementing the ASN

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the R6 interface towards the Base Stations. This calls for extensive inter-working and inter-operability testing with third party vendors, skills that can only be acquired by working on a diverse range of systems.

feedback can be received only after software and hardware integration have been completed. As a result, developers are forced to spend a majority of their time trying to fit their applications into the NPU architecture, rather than focusing on key features of the application itself. To achieve a NP implementation that meets the required performance metrics, partitioning of functionality onto processing elements and threads is extremely crucial. Developers need to spend considerable time mapping the properties of the application onto the underlying hardware. As an example, for ASN Gateway packet routing, the application could logically be split into packet receive, header processing, and packet transmit. For a router application, on the other hand, code can be repartitioned into concurrent receive micro-engines to separate receive, header check, route lookup, and packet descriptor write functions. Incorrect partitioning can lead to unbalanced utilization of processing elements and over utilization of memory registers and SRAM, thus impacting performance. Optimal scheduling and arbitration of the NPs shared resources is equally important. These resources include memories, buses, registers, accelerators and so on. While, thread scheduling on processing elements is usually achieved using a round-robin approach, memory controllers and buses employ a variety of dynamic arbitration mechanisms. Programmers need to synchronize all these together to ensure overall pipeline synergy. For instance, on Intels IXP, arbitration of shared resources can be done by implementing token passing schemes using inter-thread signaling for FIFO arbitration and restricting the number of concurrent accesses to control status registers. To solve the data transfer management problem, engineers should address two key issues: . Transfer of data transfer between memory and computational units . Assignment of data to different memory units Some NPs also have built-in mechanisms to tackle this issue. For instance, the Motorola C5 NP moves the computation related to SRAM memory units into a specialized memory controller (TLU and QMU), thereby localizing memory accesses and ensuring larger available bandwidth for other functions.
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Typical Challenges While Programming for Network Processors

Most of todays commercially available NPs are built using proprietary core architectures. For instance, the Ezchip NP uses four types of Task Optimized Processors (TOP) to process packets, with each NP, having a unique functionality, such as Parsing, Table Lookup, Traffic Metering, Packet Modification, and so on. AMCCs NPs, on the other hand, use a set of multithreaded nPcores with each core supporting 24 contexts with an instruction set optimized for packet processing. Intels NPs use multiple Microengines which have integrated hardware acceleration units for encryption. The Motorola NPs incorporate the concept of Channel Processors (CP) with multiple threads per CP. To extract maximum performance from these packet processors, engineers need to utilize vendor-specific tools and perform assembly-level micro coding. These tools range from micro-code assemblers to high-level compilers and code generators. Some code generators provide functional language interfaces to generate the processor code, such as FPL and ASL found in Ageres NPs. The syntax and semantics of the micro-code is extremely vendor-specific and implementation of the same functionality may require completely different approaches on different NPs. For instance, while implementing IPv4 forwarding logic on AMCCs np7110 microcontroller, Aricent used AMCCs micro-code semantics. However, while implementing the same on Intel IXP 1200, Intel-specific micro-code instructions were used. Motorola C5 presents a different challenge by including a hybrid-programming interface that uses a combination of RISC core and its proprietary VLIW core. In this case, Aricents IPv4 forwarding logic was implemented in C, using C-Ware APIs. Optimizations need to be performed at every stage of the development process to ensure that the implemented micro-code implements the desired functionality with maximum efficiency within the processing elements. The process of Manual Tuning, apart from assuming an intimate knowledge of the hardware micro-architecture, also tends to be a time consuming and iterative process. Using this process, performance

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Developi ng a WiMAX ASN Gateway

3. Developing a WiMAX ASN Gateway

To facilitate OEMs in developing ASN Gateway nodes, Aricent offers the SigASN (the Signaling module of a WiMAX ASN Gateway) product as well as professional development, testing, and integration services. SigASN is Aricents platform-independent WiMAX Signaling module and forms a key component of several WiMAX ASN Gateway solutions. This off-the-shelf component is WiMAX Forum standards-compliant, and provides ASN Gateway functionalities, such as mobility, handover support, bi-cast control, tunnel management (both towards the BS and the HA), authentication mediation function, IP address allocation function, and accounting. It has a well-defined API interface which allows easy integration with various Data Plane implementations. SigASN is intended to support 3000 simultaneous end-users and six Base Stations and has consequently been designed as a monolithic block running on a single processor core (Slow Path). OEMs can utilize SigASN to implement the complete signaling functionality required in ASN Gateways and hence achieve significant time-tomarket and cost benefits. In addition, Aricent specializes in offering comprehensive customization and integration services for the development and creation of perfect-fit ASN Gateway solutions, thus catering to customer requirements, such as manageability, high availability, and Fast Path realization. Aricents WiMAX-related services include: . Technical Consultancy Services: Aricents WiMAX experts help conceptualize and design a complete ASN Gateway node as per the customers specific requirements. Performance expectations from ASN Gateways vary according to the type and number of Base Stations (pico, micro, and macro) to be supported and the associated number of mobile subscribers. Full-duplex data traffic handling capacities on R4 and R6 interfaces can vary between 1GBps to 10 GBps. Typical Fast Path processing requirements can lie in the range of 100K Packets Per Second (PPS) to 200K PPS. The Control Plane may need to process 12K to 20K of signaling messages per second. Scalability and extensibility requirements may require providing support for multiple ASN topologies, such as hierarchical, hub-and-spoke, and multi-hop. In addition, there are mobility-related issues, such as handover time, buffering, and the percentage of successful handoffs. After analyzing several such ASN-specific parameters, the software and hardware architecture of the system is defined. . Development Services: These services include development of ASN Gateway data, the Control and the Management Plane components, along with the associated system level functionality. Owing to a large number of NP architectures and proprietary tools and languages available today, the learning curve for development using micro-code has become increasingly steep. Aricent, with its experience across multiple NPs, such as Intel IXP2XXX, Motorola/Freescale, AMCC, Wintegra, EzChip, and Agere, has developed strong expertise on vendor-specific architectures, tools, and programming languages. Development of the ASN Gateway Fast Path functionality is usually achieved through the following steps: . Partitioning the ASN Gateway functionality onto processors and threads . Scheduling and arbitration of various NP resources, such as bus, specialized units, and memory . Data transfer management . Optimization Aricent employs powerful software tools that allow developers to define Data Plane behavior of the system, utilizing an abstracted graphical programming interface. For most of these tools, the graphical interface is tightly and seamlessly integrated with a C development environment for the Control Plane. Real-time performance analyzers are utilized, which immediately indicate how efficiently the developed software micro-code is going to perform, thus removing the long traditional performance tuning cycle from the development process. For instance, Intels Internet Exchange Architecture (IXA) SDK provides an easy-to-use graphical development environment that can be used to develop, debug, profile, optimize, and simulate micro-engine code. The use of cycle-accurate simulators allows developers to identify opportunities for code optimization by capturing history and statistics that show cycle-by-cycle interactions among the micro-engines and memory units. Subsequent to Fast and Slow Path development, implementation of the third and the final plane, and Management Plane is required. In the context of an ASN Gateway, the Management Plane comprises an Element Management System (EMS), which manages the ASN Gateway network elements. The EMS acts as an interface for the operator to configure and manage various ASN Gateway equipments. Typically, the following functionality would be implemented as part of an EMS system: . Fault Management: This functionality is responsible for handling all alarms/events report by the CSGW via SNMP traps. Fault Management also includes the capability to forward the alarms to other network management systems. . Configuration Management: The Configuration Management module would typically manage all resources of the ASN Gateway, such as radio resources, and equipment resources. Configuration Management provides operations, such as creation and deletion of resources. It stores the entire configuration information in the database and uses SNMP for managing the resources. Configuration Management can also maintain profiles of configuration data that can be applied at the ASN Gateway at any time.

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. Topology Management: This module provides multiple hierarchical views for custom graphical representation of the networks topology. A Chassis View can also be launched from the Topology View. . Performance Management: In the context of the ASN Gateway, this would mean collection of statistics from the CSGW using SNMP. Perfomance Management provides performance data logging and archiving of data after a certain period. Generating reports based on the performance data collected is another key role of this module. . Security Management: This module provides authentication and authorization of the users. It provides capabilities to create, delete, and modify users/groups, and to configure the operations that a set of users can perform. . Administration Management: The Administration Management provides operations, such as initialization of the CSGW and enabling/ disabling trace levels. It also provides functionalities, such as software management of the network element. A script-based interface is provided for backup/restore of the EMS database. . Integration Services: The capability to deliver end-to-end WiMAX ASN Gateway solutions requires a deep understanding of the Control Plane, Data Plane, and the Management Plane, along with associated datacom protocol expertise. Tight integration of the Data and Control Plane enables several performance efficiencies. For instance, the control processor may leverage the classification and provisioning completed by the Data Plane processor. Statistics generation is another function that is enhanced by the efficient integration of these two planes information can be collected in the Data Plane and processed in the Control Plane. Aricent achieves integration of the two planes by developing Network Processor-specific glue layers, which are fine-tuned to provide efficient interfacing between the two planes. This abstraction layer ensures that features, such as Route Management, Policy Management, Interface Management, Packet Handling, and Statistics Retrieval, are glued together with the Data Plane so that a change in the managed entities of one of the planes is reflected in the other. Aricent has the capability to deliver end-to-end ASN Gateway solutions by integrating in-house/third party developed wireless and datacom IPRs with the underlying hardware. This saves the customers the trouble of inter-working heterogeneous software and hardware components.

. Testing Services: OEMs developing their own WiMAX Gateways would need to perform rigorous testing of various ASN software functionalities. These testing activities can be classified into Test Engineering and Consulting, Test execution, Test Automation, and Multi-Vendor Interoperability testing. WiMAX Fast Path testing involves creation of test stubs and traffic generators, which reside on processing elements and generate test traffic into the processing pipeline. Tools, such as Intels Transactor Tool are also available, which include a Scripting Engine for setting test configurations and creating test cases. Aricent performs Control Plane testing for all external entities with which the CSGW is expected to interact. These external entities would typically include either simulated or live AAA, HA, MSS/BS, and Multicast Routers. The goal while testing the ASN Gateway Control Plane testing is to validate all the inter-working scenarios between the Gateway and its interfaces with respect to: . Correctness of message flows and parameter values . Failure scenarios involving handling of incorrect parameter values and incorrect messages Some of the key ASN Gateway Control Plane functionalities that need detailed testing include: . Authentication procedures . MSS Handover Location Update and Paging . Radio Resource Management . Traffic generation and receipt for uplink and downlink Subsequently, system Integration testing of ASN Gateways needs to be carried out and it involves: . System integration testing . End-to-end functional validation . Inter-operability testing . Load and Performance testing System integration testing of the ASN Gateway is done by verifying the correctness of interfaces exposed by one software module to the neighboring interacting modules and protocol components. During end-to-end functional validation, the scope is to test all the functionality of the ASN Gateway system as a black box and validate its compliance to the requirements. Inter-operability testing entails identifying and performing exhaustive end-to-end functional tests with third party Base Stations, ASN Gateways, Routers, and Switches. Load and performance testing requires developers to identify and perform test cases that would test the load handling capability of the ASN Gateway. Finally, Regression tests are carried out to validate the functioning of the ASN Gateway system as a complete black box.

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Summary

4. Summary
WiMAX has the potential to facilitate proliferation of broadband services into residential and SOHO segments that are currently under-served. Telecom operators are looking forward to it as an efficient and costeffective method of backhauling their traffic. The standard is providing a flexible solution to end users for whom current provisioning timeframes are prohibitive, or for whom wired infrastructure is not available. The standard is intended to allow multiple vendors to produce interoperable equipment. However, WiMAX also provides the opportunity for extensive vendor differentiation. Service Providers are striving hard to secure their customer base by providing mobility services at competitive rates. For these players, WiMAX has come as a high-speed and cost effective alternative to traditional technologies, such as 3G, DSL, and ATM. In such a scenario, WiMAX mobility-enabling nodes are assuming a greater significance in the Operators network infrastructure. With WiMAX gaining ground steadily, it is clear that OEMs shall increasingly look to develop, test, and deploy their own 802.16e ASN Gateway implementations. Aricent, with more than 20,000 person years experience in the wireless domain, has an innovative set of WiMAX IPRs and professional service offerings that can help OEMs attain significant time-to-market and cost benefits. Offerings, such as the Aricent SigASN, can provide TEMs with a robust WiMAX signaling framework, which can be easily integrated with third-party Data Plane hardware components. By offering full-spectrum outsourcing services for WiMAX, Aricent can help vendors design, develop, integrate, and test ASN Gateway solutions. Core expertise in the field of wireless, network processing, and data communications, along with mature SDLC and quality processes ensure that customers realize a high return on their technology investments and that their business needs are met. BS: Base Station HA: Home Agent SDK: Software Development Kit AAA: Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting MSS: Mobile Subscriber Station

6. References
C. Kulkarni, M. Gries, C. Sauer, K. Keutzer. Programming Challenges in Network Processor Deployment. Int. Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES), 178-187, October 2003.

5. Acronyms
ATM: Asynchronous Transfer Mode DSL: Digital Subscriber Line MAC: Medium Access Control ASIC: Application Specific Integrated Circuit FPGA: Field Programmable Gate Array GRE : Generic Routing Encapsulation DHCP: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol IGMP: Internet Group Management Protocol PKM: Public Key Management IKE: Internet Key Exchange CLI: Command Line Interface SNMP: Simple Network Management Protocol

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Aricent is the market leader in the communications software industry, delivering innovative solutions that help our clients change the way the world communicates. From strategy to implementation, Aricent solves the most complex, high-impact software problems facing communications companies today and in the future. Aricent combines a culture of innovation with the extensive experience of its employees to deliver a full spectrum of service offerings throughout the entire communications business lifecycle. Aricent also has more than 125 software products ranging from complex applications to network core technology-that enable the worlds leading equipment manufacturers, device manufacturers and service providers to introduce new experiences, improve time-to-revenue and maximize efficiency. Aricents proven track record builds on the success of its predecessor, Hughes Software Systems, which was established in 1991. Aricent services its 300+ global clients from 25 offices spread across 13 countries.

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