SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- Wireless equipment maker Enea rolled out its Linux Base Station Platform here during an industry event.
Enea’s real-time operating systems (RTOS) run in more than 50 percent of macrocell and LTE basestations. As the wireless industry migrates to Linux, Enea is offering a Linux implementation that it said includes real-time IP transport, IPC communication and middleware to reduce the number of extra cores required to overcome real-time constraints without an RTOS.
"Today wireless infrastructure equipment mostly uses an RTOS, but the industry is looking for a way to use Linux with its next generation basestations," said Conny Ohult, Enea’s director of product management. "To keep the bill-of-materials low, so our customers do not have to add too many extra cores to move to Linux, we are adding components to our Linux distribution to make up for the performance hit."
Communications equipment vendors are moving to open source Linux since many developers want to use cheaper solutions to enhance their networks. Many developers are also moving toward a high-level Linux OS.
To accommodate the shift to Linux while meeting real-time requirements of communication infrastructure equipment, Enea said it is offering several enhancements to its Yocto-based Linux distribution system, including its light-weight run-time threading that reduces interrupt latency, a packet accelerator for real-time IP transport functions and other features.
Enea’s new platform also supports the Freescale processors, including the latest B4860 and B4420 flavors that target micro-basestations.