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| Aperto® Network’s PacketWave® product line features a number of advanced technologies, several of which were introduced to the broadband wireless access market for the first time, by Aperto. These technologies span all layers of the protocol stack, from the antenna at layer 0 to application level QoS control at layer 7. All these technologies work together seamlessly, to bring un-precedented value to the wireless operators and their subscribers. |
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| Capacity and coverage are two of the most fundamental values in any broadband wireless product, and Aperto excels at both of them. Aperto's Spectral Efficiency (or how many bits it can pack in the available bandwidth) is one of the best in the industry. Aperto Cell Radius Coverage also exceeds that of most of the competitors. |
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| The PacketWave system can be deployed in dense cellular environments, with a high degree of frequency re-use. Two Channels are Sufficient to Cover a Single 4 or 6 Sector Cell. With the recommended cell cluster of size 3, it is possible to achieve Blanket Coverage with 6 Available Channels. If there are only 2 channels available, then static polarization can be used to achieve blanket coverage, with 4 sector cells. |
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| Aperto is alone among broadband wireless vendors in offering a Flexible Channel Size, which can vary from 6 MHz down to 1.75 MHz. In licensed bands, this enables the operator to achieve blanket coverage with smaller amount of available spectrum. In license exempt bands, it increases the number of available channels and makes it easier for the operator to find clean chunks of spectrum in a crowded environment. |
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| Aperto’s Medium Access Control (MAC) technology is based on an advanced form of Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA). TDMA is superior to other MAC technologies such as Polling and CSMA / CA, which are used by some of the other vendors in this space. Even among TDMA technologies, there are wide variations, and one such variation called DOCSIS is widely used in the Cable Modem space. However DOCSIS is not the most appropriate protocol for Broadband Wireless Access. Aperto’s implementation is closest to the TDMA technology that was recently ratified by the IEEE 802.16a Working Group, which is not surprising given that Aperto played a key role in its drafting. |
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| Aperto uses a number of technologies to make the wireless link more robust to multipath and interference, including: |
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| Working together seamlessly, these technologies enable the system to keep operating smoothly, even with packet error rates as high as 5-10%. This enables the system to operate in OLOS/NLOS environments, as well as in crowded license exempt frequency bands where Interference is an un-avoidable fact of life. |
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| Aperto’s ServiceQ® technology offers the most comprehensive QoS support in the broadband wireless industry. ServiceQ enables the following traffic classes across the wireless interface: |
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| ServiceQ has been designed to support a high degree of Over-Subscription, to increase operator revenues. Each traffic class contains multiple flows, and there can be up to 16 flows per Subscriber Unit (SU). Multiple flows are conceptually equivalent to partitioning a single physical SU, into Multiple Virtual SUs so that a SU that supports 16 flows, is equivalent to 16 virtual SUs operating in parallel. The system treats each one of the virtual SUs as a separate entity in the following respects: |
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- Each virtual SU gets its own packet buffer that is isolated from the others
- Each virtual SU is assigned its own service class (CBR, CIR or BE)
- Each virtual SU is assigned its own minimum guaranteed and peak bandwidth allocation
- Each virtual SU contends for the channel independently of the others
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| When a packet comes into the Ethernet port of the SU, it gets classified and routed to one of the virtual SUs, and from then on it is handled separately from the others. In an MDU/MTU application, each tenant gets his own virtual SU, with its own bandwidth guarantees. In an Enterprise application, a virtual SU with bandwidth guarantees can be assigned to a mission critical application. |
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| ServiceQ supports Peak Rate Shaping of traffic, on a per virtual SU basis, for all service classes. In fact peak rate shaping is referred to by some in the industry as "QoS", though true QoS support also encompasses capabilities such as CBR and CIR support and per-flow queueing. |
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| Aperto offers rich set of networking protocol support on the PacketWave platform, including: |
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| These features enable the PacketWave system to easily adapt itself to the needs of almost any network configuration that the operator may desire, all the way from a simple flat bridged network, to a sophisticated routed network with multiple subnets per wireless port. |
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| The Aperto PacketWave system includes the WaveCenterTM suite of management and configuration tools. This tool package provides management agents to allow remote and/or centralized monitoring and management of elements as well as billing and event collection. These agents allow device/network management using either a browser, SNMP or command line interface. WaveCenter supports standard MIB-2 as well as hundreds of proprietary MIBs. |
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| In addition several tools are provided to facilitate the configuration and management of each base station system (i.e. base station, each channel and all SUs served by this base station). Those tools include: |
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| These tools provide all functionalities to the service provider to configure, manage, control and monitor each of PacketWave systems. |
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| WaveCenter also offers SNMP access to all fault, performance, accounting and security parameters and statistics. Third party SNMP applications can therefore be developed or adapted to interface with a network of PacketWave systems. Customization of the PacketWave system is required to offer configuration access through the SNMP interface. |
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