Recently I wrote an article on Internal TDM, or iTDM, which has just appeared in the May issue of CompactPCI and AdvancedTCA Systems magazine.
My interest in iTDM came from our need to support a mixture of legacy TDM and VoIP in the same chassis, including in AdvancedTCA chassis and on Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMCs).
The AdvancedTCA (ATCA) specifications for next generation telecom equipment have gained a lot of traction, at least in the telecom industry. ATCA supports telecom approaches to power, cooling, packaging, reliability, management and serviceability. It's extremely scalable and, from the beginning, ATCA developments have focused on packet transport and on leveraging high-speed serial interconnects (Gigabit Ethernet, StarFabric, Serial RapidIO, etc.).
The only thing ATCA hasn’t
done well, at least so far, is support traditional TDM circuit switching. VoIP protocols aren't well suited to our requirements for TDM transport and switching within a chassis. For NMS, iTDM over Ethernet with VLAN hits the nail on head. The article attempts to explains why.
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