Stack Foundation

The wide range of constantly changing protocols implies products, training and specialized development services to allow a soft introduction of protocols in customers' projects. With the MARBEN Stack Foundation, Marben Products provides a generic and efficient framework to speed up developments, tests and deployments of new network elements. This offer allows you to focus your investments on one common leading technology.

The MARBEN Stack Foundation

The MARBEN Stack foundation called MARBEN OSIAM foundation is the core of all OSIAM communication stacks. Its goal is twofold:

• To isolate communication protocol layers from the system environment. As such, it provides all system services (e.g. memory and data buffers management, time management, inter-process communication…) through a fully portable interface. In addition, it provides communication interfaces both for user applications and subnetwork providers;
• To schedule internal message (or data) flow between layers. Thanks to clearly defined layer interfaces, message exchanges are transparent to protocol layers and fully handled by the OSIAM Foundation kernel.

The MARBEN OSIAM Stack foundation is a horseshoe encapsulating the protocol layers. This is made of a porting kit providing three interfaces with the environment:

• The operating system interface offers a unified view of the required system services to the inner components;
• The South bound interface is fully open to grant access to all kinds of subnetwork providers (Ethernet, LAPD, PPP, TCP/IP socket layer, …);
• The North bound interface allows user application to access any layer services offered by the stack, including protocol layers services and stack management services based on MIB interface.

While the porting kit interfaces with the environment, the kernel implements all the functionalities required for portable protocol development. This core engine covers message handling and events scheduling. It is also in charge of the stack general management.

All services offered by the MARBEN OSIAM Stack Foundation let communication protocol layers focus on their actual duty. The benefits are multiple:

• Being based on common and highly qualified foundation, all protocol stacks benefit from its stability;
• The MARBEN OSIAM Stack foundation is a flexible and tailored framework that provides a highly modular architecture. All kinds of protocols, such as IP/MPLS, TDM or WDM control plane can be implemented within this framework and any kind of protocol combination can be built with no additional development;
• All components within the horseshoe are fully portable. In other words, the very same protocol component source code is used on all supported system platforms.

Key Features

• Portability

  Developed in C language (with ANSI C and K&R support), this framework is portable on 32 and 64 bits system platform. Off-the-shelf support is provided for:

  
  
  • Linux Real time or Embedded (Montavista, WindRiver, ...);
  • Real-time OS (VxWorks, pSOS+, VRTX);
  • Unix(s) (HP-UX, all Linux, SCO, SUN Solaris, IBM AIX, ...);
  • Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008.


• Efficiency and scalability

  Optimized memory management. All data buffers are exchanged without memory copy within the stack. Support of thousands of connections or million LSP.



• Testability and troubleshooting

  Integrated testing facilities: all protocol layer interfaces can be exercised through command lines or scenarii. Extensive tracing facilities: traces of activity can be activated on each service access point and dump of connections can be requested.



• Configuration and management

  Extensive configuration at load time and run time. Most of the stack and protocol layer parameters can be modified after compilation and while the stack is up and running. Administrative interface is provided for the user's management application. A command line interface tool is provided to access all levels of configuration and tracing.



• Development environment

  Tools for simple design of stack (add-and-drop of protocol layers). Designing a stack is as simple as writing a few lines description. Stack generation environment with makefiles generation.