Aculab’s Prosody family of products includes E1/T1 digital network access options in a number of form factors.  Importantly, for developers and systems integrators who are looking to deploy telephony solutions into the telco and service provider markets, Aculab offers its proven digital network access and signalling protocol support in a CompactPCI (cPCI) form factor. The high performance, standards compliant Prosody X cPCI E1/T1 board offers all of the essential features necessary for telco grade products including high density, high availability, reliability and scalability.

High density, high value
Aculab’s board is offered in a range of high density, digital network access options that allow any protocol – whether E1 or T1 – to be used and changed independently, without the need for a restart, on a per network line interface basis.

Essential variants include 8 and 16 trunk options and, therefore, a single board, occupying one backplane slot, provides up to 496 voice data channels. Multiple boards can be installed in a cPCI chassis, providing a scalable, high capacity solution in a single server. Dedicated applications can make full use of board bus capacity, which is essential for switching and gateway applications. Beneficially, this means customers gain a distinct advantage in terms of overall system cost and resultant margins.

Users can mix and match several protocols on the same board and in fact, as each trunk or ‘span’ is independently software selectable between E1 and T1, both interface types can be supported simultaneously on a single board. Importantly, network impedance terminations are also software selectable on a per trunk basis. Tone based signalling for inter-working into legacy CAS and R2 derivative infrastructures is supported as are A-law and µ-law coding conversions on a per channel basis.

Through this inherent flexibility in configuration of the Prosody X cPCI E1/T1 board, users get the benefit of being able to specify one product for all systems regardless of where in the world they are deployed. In addition, high density means system board count can be minimised, providing excellent cost-effectiveness on a per channel basis.

Value added protocol support
For developers targeting their applications at markets worldwide, Aculab’s entire protocol heritage is available from software downloads. The widest range of protocols, including many national and international variants of ISDN, CAS and SS7, is readily available to Aculab’s customers, under a cost free licence, for use with its boards. Protocols are offered for both public and private network connectivity and include options for network or user end terminations. This simply adds to the value to be won when using Aculab’s digital network access boards.

Aculab’s dual redundant SS7 protocol stack coverage, with flexible configuration options and accessible APIs, enables the development of resilient call and non-call related signalling applications. Signalling link capacity is 128 links per board and the SS7 software itself imposes no limit on the number of bearer channels that can be configured. MTP, ISUP, SCCP and TCAP procedures are supported, with the integrated SS7 signalling monitor and maintenance APIs adding even greater value.

Telco grade functionality
Aculab’s Prosody X cPCI E1/T1 board has been designed with a focus on reliability and system availability – critical requirements for a telecom server application. The product provides hot swap and board protection mechanisms, and supports sophisticated redundancy management to allow the creation of applications with ‘five 9s’ availability (99.999%), independent of the final solution scale or channel count.

Critically, for resilience and failover purposes, trunks on a Prosody X cPCI E1/T1 board can be independently accessed by several high level applications, either on the local host or on remote machines. In case of failure of the main high level application, the board control can be switched to a remote standby alternative, therefore, providing service continuity by implementation of either N+1 or 1+1 protection schemes.

Fundamentally, this also means that applications can share trunk board resources, which gives the benefit of being able to provision hardware for hosted applications in an optimal, cost effective way.

Prosody X cPCI E1/T1 boards can be distributed amongst different chassis platforms offering added resilience and further scalability. A dual redundant 1Gb Ethernet interface provides the external IP connection, while the host’s cPCI bus will view a board as if it were a NIC. Support for SNMP is offered to help manage boards, with appropriate information usually provided via the API being made available via the MIB. Both Net-SNMP and Microsoft’s SNMP are offered to provide choice and the host-based solution allows one agent to report on multiple boards.

Flexibility in practice
Aculab’s cross platform APIs mean that the learning curve for developers looking to leverage applications onto cPCI technology is short, with low risk. The flexibility and ease of use of boards and APIs and comprehensive operating system support (for Linux, SPARC Solaris and Windows platforms) enables all markets to be rapidly and readily tackled.

For complex system designs requiring additional media processing resources, channels can be routed over any of the 4096 timeslots on the H.110 bus to other boards in the Prosody range. A complementary mix of Prosody X cPCI E1/T1 and Prosody X cPCI boards can be combined for applications that require media processing resources, such as record, playback and echo cancellation, to deliver powerful communications solutions.

Related links:

Product pages Digital network access E1/T1 PCI board SS7 Media processing resources Protocols and approvals     Technical documents     Software downloads Press releases Aculab announces E1/T1 PCIe board, with PCI Express bus compatibility     Product withdrawal notice

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