Mobile IP/MPLS Backbone Networks

Overview

In early generation mobile networks, the packet core was used for best effort data services with relatively loose requirements in the quality of service area. In a next generation network, the packet core must carry voice traffic along with other high bandwidth data and video service offerings. To be successful, these networks must support powerful quality of service attributes.

As more services are carried over the packet core network, the user's overall experience will be highly dependent on the reliability and availability of that core. Increasingly, residential and business users will depend on mobile services, carried over the packet core, to support and enhance their daily activities. Users will show loyalty to providers who can deliver consistent availability and high performance.

Alcatel-Lucent's product and solution lineup of routing and switching equipment has been carefully architected to support multiple services with multiple QoS levels, assuring strict, per-service service level agreements at any traffic volume -- delivered equally over IP, MPLS and ATM with high availability. Available in appropriate form factors, with demonstrated industry-leading high availability, Alcatel-Lucent's packet core networking solutions are being deployed as part of end-to-end Alcatel-Lucent mobile networks worldwide.

Benefits

Carrier-class, high availability: With the carriage of broadband and enterprise data and, increasingly, the transport of voice over the mobile core, the reliability and availability of the mobile backbone becomes more important than ever. The Alcatel-Lucent Service Router line of products bring a number of significant differentiated High Availability capabilities to the mobile backbone. These capabilities include non-stop routing and signaling, the ability to carry out in-service software upgrades across the majority of software releases, full redundancy of all significant physical systems and independently verified benchmarks in sheer route processing speed to allow fast network convergence. In addition, the 5620 Service Aware Manager brings powerful provisioning and troubleshooting tools to allow rapid service turn up and return to service.

Powerful QoS and traffic management : A mobile backbone has to support a number of traffic types, for example: Voice (user) traffic, Signaling traffic, OAM traffic, data traffic and ultimately, IMS traffic. This is driven by the mobile elements themselves as they increase their capability to differentiate and mark traffic, a rise in traffic volume generally and carrying fixed broadband applications on the same infrastructure. The Alcatel-Lucent Service Router line of products delivers wire-rate performance and excellent scaling across all the components of QoS - Classification and Marking, Policing , Shaping, Queuing and Scheduling.

Scalability: up and down: Alcatel-Lucent Service Routers come in a range of form factors suited to differing capacity and space requirements. However, all the capabilities captured here are available right across the product range - not just in the large form factor core devices but also the platforms situated closer to the edge where a lot of the crucial traffic conditioning takes place.

End-to-end proven solutions: As a leading vendor of mobile elements as well as IP/MPLS Backbone components such as the Service Router Alcatel Lucent is well positioned to deliver end-to-end proven solutions and deployment assistance in both complex network transformations or relatively minor platform upgrade.

Bali talks try to end impasse on Climate goals

Nusa Dua, Indonesia - Negotiators at climate talks in Bali tried to break a deadlock on Friday over emissions goals after the European Union accused the United States of blocking progress at the 190-nation meeting.

The two-week talks, which are supposed to end on Friday, aim to launch two years of negotiations on an international pact to fight global warming. But the United States, Japan and Canada are opposed to any reference to numerical goals for emissions in the final text.

Ministerial talks ran deep into the night to break the impasse at the U.N.-led talks involving 10,000 delegates.

"The points of difference of position have become much clearer. We will try to consolidate all the different views in the (next) meeting," said an Indonesian delegate who did not want to be named.

"The numerical target has become the major subject of contention with the same countries holding the same positions," the delegate told Reuters.

The EU wants Bali's final text to agree a non-binding goal of cuts in emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 for industrial economies. The United States says any figures would prejudge the outcome.

The United Nations wants the Bali talks to launch formal negotiations on a deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol by 2009 as the world faces rising seas, more extreme droughts and floods and spread of disease.

Kyoto caps greenhouse gas emissions of all industrial nations except the United States until 2012.

Developing nations are exempt from Kyoto's 2008-2012 first phase and say that before they sign up to any broader agreement, rich countries, particularly the United States as the world's top greenhouse gas emitter, should take the lead in pledging cuts.

Washington submitted a new text to the talks around midnight on Thursday that stressed voluntary goals for greenhouse gases rather than binding Kyoto-style caps for developed countries.

Progress

On other issues, the Bali talks made progress.

Negotiators agreed a deal in principle to share technology -- such as wind turbines or solar panels -- to help poor nations. This week, the talks have also agreed the workings of a fund to help poor nations adapt to climate change and are hoping to take steps to slow deforestation.

The EU threatened on Thursday to pull out of a U.S. meeting of major greenhouse gas emitters next month.

"If we would have a failure in Bali it would be meaningless to have a major economies' meeting" in the United States, Humberto Rosa, Portugal's Secretary of State for Environment, said in Bali. Portugal holds the rotating EU presidency.

Washington, long at odds with many of its Western allies on climate policies, has called a meeting of 17 nations, including China, Russia and India, in Hawaii in late January to discuss long-term curbs on greenhouse gases.

Despite opposition to Kyoto, the United States plans to join a new treaty, meant to be agreed in Copenhagen in late 2009 with participation of developing nations led by China and India.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, fresh from collecting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, won rapturous applause on the sidelines by adding his voice to criticisms of Washington.

"My own country the United States is principally responsible for obstructing progress in Bali," he said.

The United Nations says a Kyoto successor has to be in place in two years to give governments time to ratify the new deal by the end of 2012 and to give markets clear guidelines on how to make investments in clean energy technology.

In a further sign the planet is heating up, the 11 warmest years on record have all occurred in the past 13 years, with 2007 set to be the seventh hottest since 1950, Britain's Met Office and the University of East Anglia said on Thursday.

Another study, to be published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, says that in less than 50 years, oceans might be too acidic for coral reefs to grow because of carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels by humans.