Turbo-EPON™ Firmware

An essential part of Teknovus’ EPON product solution is the firmware that provides system vendors with a robust and flexible application foundation upon which they tailor their products to carrier and service requirements. Now in its eighth major revision, Teknovus firmware is at the heart of EPON systems in use by more than 35 carriers with more than 4 million ONUs deployed.

Teknovus firmware undergoes rigorous regression testing prior to all releases, ensuring trouble-free non-service disruptive deployment in live networks. Testing is conducted in a dedicated laboratory which runs over 300,000 test scenarios. With automated analysis and reporting, issues are isolated and addressed by Teknovus’ 35-member team of Software Development and Test Engineers.

Teknovus firmware runs on Teknovus chip’s OLT and ONU processors, enabling fast development of carrier-grade solutions for System Management, Provisioning, Network Security, and Maintenance & Diagnostics. The Teknovus system architecture alleviates the Host from real-time data-path processing, enhancing system performance and scalability, and simplifies product differentiation according to unique carrier and service requirements. Once provisioned, the OLT and ONUs may operate independently of the OLT host processor.

The control plane architecture may be broken down into the following components:

Host Interface

The Host Interface provides a standardized communications protocol and demarcation between the system’s upper layer hierarchy (e.g., NMS, EMS, provisioning, OAM) and the Teknovus-based EPON transport. It is host-hardware/software agnostic and supports software upgrades with minimal service interruption. Communication between the Host and the OLT device may include any of the following:

• Memory-mapped I/O via asynchronous bus;
• UDP connection over 10/100 Ethernet
• In-band via SNI

Provisioning and Service Management

This layer provides the system vendors the ability to provision the PON system based on the service offerings that a carrier may be interested in and effectively manage the services provisioned. This layer encapsulates the entire Data path provisioning at the OLT and ONU that is required to offer a service and the necessary service management functionality like QOS setting, statistics and alarm monitoring that are needed to manage the service. A comprehensive suite of provisioning functionality allows the system vendors to tailor the system to meet different carrier requirements swiftly and efficiently. In addition to the proprietary provisioning scheme built as an extension to IEEE 802.3ah, Teknovus software also supports the China Telecom specified service management model.

Layer-3-Aware Functionality

Network security is a key carrier requirement that ensures its customers are protected against malicious users. Teknovus solution addresses all the key security holes without the need for additional hardware or software. Teknovus’ ability to inspect the different layers of the frame coupled with a rich software suite provides a carrier class secure network. DHCP Proxy, ARP/NDP Proxy, Access Control Lists provide the necessary arsenal to build a secure network.

In addition to security, Teknovus offers a comprehensive Multicast Management suite that allows the system vendors to manage Multicast traffic precisely. Lack of multicast management  can result in wasting network bandwidth thus limiting either the number of customers supported on a PON or force the carrier to over engineer the network. Teknovus supports both IGMP and MLD for multicast management.

Layer-2 & QoS Functionality

Traffic and SLA management, including queue management, is performed in this layer.