SCIENCE

Wind River has announced its collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent to develop common platform assets for Alcatel-Lucent's wireless network base station portfolio. Alcatel-Lucent's common platform provides the hardware and software foundation for present and future generations of its wireless network products, including both time division duplex and frequency division duplex variants of 4G or LTE base stations. Alcatel-Lucent will use Wind River Linux, optimized for the Freescale QorIQ P4080 multi-core processor, to develop and support the common platform.

Given the growing demands from ever increasing wireless data traffic, Alcatel-Lucent evaluated a number of solutions to ensure it would be able to create a common foundation with high performance and reliability for its wireless network infrastructure. Wind River Linux delivered on Alcatel-Lucent's needs for open source innovation and customization available from Linux, coupled with the benefits of a stable, carrier grade commercial product as well as the latest in multi-core software technologies.

"Together with Alcatel-Lucent, we are working to attain higher levels of performance to address the need for faster, more efficient and intelligent networks," said Mike Langlois, general manager for networking and telecommunications at Wind River. "Wind River is able to provide customized, accelerated access to optimized multi-core hardware and software solutions to help Alcatel-Lucent achieve faster time-to-market for its 4G solutions. Our strategic collaboration will ultimately help to deliver on greater quality of service expectations and performance demands."

"The need for higher speeds from wireless networks requires top performance, and to achieve this we needed to look to the latest multi-core technologies integrated with a world-class Linux distribution," said Bill Zucker, vice president of wireless common assets and platforms at Alcatel-Lucent. "It was critical to find a partner with the multi-core expertise that could help us extract the best performance from cutting-edge hardware. Thanks to Wind River's deep relationships across the embedded ecosystem and ability to tightly integrate and optimize multi-core hardware and software solutions, we can create highly scalable products that meet the market's increasing demand for greater performance."

The Alcatel-Lucent common platform is based on Wind River Linux and includes the recently released Linux kernel version 2.6.34. The latest revision of PREEMPT RT was used to advance pre-emption capabilities and create a Linux kernel that is more deterministic, with reduced latency for a real-time response. To ensure its readiness for the latest multi-core architectures, Wind River Linux was optimized to fully support the QorIQ P4080 processor.

Wind River also provides testing, integration and long-term local support and services appropriate for the long life cycle of network infrastructure products. Wind River's customized support for Alcatel-Lucent included early access to new features, all of which were optimized to Alcatel-Lucent's multi-core architecture of choice. Wind River is able to provide local support near the sites of the Alcatel-Lucent design teams developing the common platform.