What is Pseudowires

Communications service providers and enterprise customers are interested in

deployment of voice and leased line services over efficient Ethernet, IP and MPLS
infrastructures. While Voice over IP (VoIP) is maturing, its deployment requires an
investment in new network infrastructure and customer premises equipment (CPE).
TDM pseudowires present a migration path, whereby modern packet switched
networks can be used for transport, while the end-user equipment need not be
immediately replaced.

TDM pseudowires were developed in 1998 by RAD Data Communications as

TDMoIP® and first deployed in Sweden in 1999 by Utfors (later acquired by
Telenor). Utfors employed the first generation TDMoIP product (known as the
IPmux-4) to provide bundled services, including TDM private lines, TDM leased
lines and a variety of IP and Ethernet services. In 2001, the IETF set up the PWE3
working group, which was chartered to develop an architecture for edge-to-edge
pseudowires, and to produce encapsulation specifications for various client
services, including TDM. Other standardization forums, including the ITU, MEF
and the MFA Forum, are also active in producing standards and implementation
agreements for pseuodwires.

Pseudowire Definition
A pseudowire is an emulation of a native service over a packet switched network
(PSN). The native service may be low-rate TDM, SDH/SONET, ATM, Frame
Relay, or Ethernet while the PSN may be Ethernet, MPLS, or IP (either IPv4 or
IPv6).

A pseudowire emulates the operation of a "transparent wire" carrying the native

service. The first pseudowire specifications were the “Martini Draft” for ATM
pseudowires in the backbone or core network, and the TDMoIP draft authored by
RAD Data Communications for transport of E1/T1 over IP in the access.

TDM pseudowire, pioneered and patented by RAD Data Communications as

TDMoIP®, emulates time division multiplexing (TDM) over a packet-switched
network. Here TDM means a T1, E1, T3 or E3 signal, while the PSN is based
either on IP or MPLS or on raw Ethernet. The term circuit emulation, which
originally referred to transport of TDM traffic over cell-based ATM networks, is
now often used synonymously with TDM pseudowire.
TDM Pseudowire Format PSN

Handling TDM structure

Although TDM can be used to carry arbitrary bit streams at the rates defined in
G.702, there are standardized methods of carrying bit streams in larger units each
containing the same number of bits, called frames. TDM framing locks the frame
rate to the sampling frequency of voice traffic, so that there are always 8000
frames per second; a T1 frame consists of 193 bits and a E1 frame of 256 bits.
Unlike unframed TDM for which all bits are available for payload, framed TDM
requires dedicating of some number of bits per frame for synchronization and
perhaps various other functions (e.g. 1 bit per T1 frame, 8 bits per E1 frame).
Framed TDM is often used to multiplex multiple voice channels each consisting of
8000 8-bit samples per second in a sequence of timeslots recurring in each frame.
When this is done we have "channelized TDM" and additional structure must be
introduced.

In order to efficiently transport slowly varying channel associated signalling bits,

second order structures known as multiframes or superframes are defined. For
example, for E1 trunks the CAS signaling bits are updated once per multiframe of
16 frames (every 2 milliseconds) while for T1 ESF trunks the superframe is 24
frames (3 milliseconds). Other types of second order structures are also in common
use. In GSM cellular networks, the A-bis channel that connects the Base
Transceiver Station (BTS) and Base Station Controller (BSC) is an E1 link with
several framing alternatives, all of which have a basic superframe duration of 20
milliseconds. The term "structured TDM" is used to refer to TDM with any level of
structure, including 'framed TDM' and 'channelized TDM'.

TDM pseudowire transport is denoted "structured-agnostic" when the TDM is

unframed, or when it is framed or even channelized, but the framing and
channelization structure are completely disregarded by the transport mechanisms.
In such cases all structural overhead must be transparently transported along with
the payload data, and the encapsulation method employed provides no mechanisms
for its location or utilization. Structure-aware TDM transport may explicitly
safeguard TDM structure, in three conceptually distinct ways, which we shall call
structure-locking, structure-indication, and structure-reassembly. Structure-locking
ensures that packets consist of entire TDM structures or multiples/fractions thereof.
Structure-indication allows packets to contain arbitrary fragments of basic
structures, but employs pointers to indicate where the following structure
commences. In structure-reassembly components of the TDM structures may be
extracted and reorganized at ingress, and the original structure reassembled from
the received constituents at egress.

TDM Pseudowire Format

TDM pseudowire operates by segmenting, adapting and encapsulating the TDM
traffic at PSN ingress and performing the inverse operations at PSN egress.
Adaptation denotes mechanisms that modify the payload to enable its proper
restoration at the PSN egress. By using proper adaptation, the TDM signaling and
timing can be recovered, and a certain amount of packet loss can be
accommodated. Encapsulation signifies placing the adapted payload into packets
of the format required by the underlying PSN technology. ITU-T Recommendation
Y.1413 contains a complete description of the packet formats for MPLS PSNs,
while Y.1453 does the same for IP PSNs.
Generic Pseudowire Encapsulation

In all cases a TDM pseudowire packet commences with PSN headers. These are
the standard headers used by the PSN technology, e.g. the 20-byte header of
UDP/IP, or the label-stack of MPLS. After these headers come the "PW label", a
four-byte MPLS-like label that serves as to demultiplex different TDM PWs.

TDM Pseudowire Control Word

After the PSN header comes the four-byte TDM pseudowire "control word". The
control word contains a 16-bit packet sequence number (needed to detect packet
re-ordering and packet loss), payload length, and flags indicating defect conditions.
After the control word comes the TDM pseudowire payload. For structure-agnostic
transport (SAToP) this is simply a predetermined number of TDM octets, while for
the structure-locked format the payload is an integer number of TDM frames. For
structure-indication and structure-reassembly TDMoIP draws on proven adaptation
mechanisms originally developed for ATM. A side benefit of this choice of
payload types is simplified interworking with circuit emulation services carried
over ATM networks. For statically allocated, constant bit-rate (CBR) TDM links,
TDMoIP employs ATM adaptation layer 1 (AAL1). This mechanism, defined in
ITU-T standard I.363.1 and ATM Forum specification atm-vtoa-0078, was
developed for carrying CBR services over ATM. AAL1 operates by segmenting
the continuous stream of TDM data into small 48-byte cells and inserting
sequencing, timing, error recovery, and synchronization information into them.
TDMoIP allows concatenation of any number of AAL1 cells into a packet (note
that these are AAL1 cells and not ATM cells, i.e. they do not include the five-byte
"cell tax"). By allowing multiple cells per packet, TDMoIP facilitates flexible
tradeoffs of buffering delay (which decreases with fewer cells per packet) for
bandwidth efficiency (which increases with more cells per packet, due to the per
packet overhead). For dynamically allocated TDM links, whether the information
rate varies due to activation of time slots or due to voice activity detection,
TDMoIP employs ATM adaptation layer 2 (AAL2). This mechanism, defined in
ITU-T standard I.363.2, was developed for carrying variable bit rate (VBR)
services over ATM. AAL2 operates by buffering each TDM time slot into short
minicells, inserting the time slot identifier and length indication, sequencing, and
then sending this minicell only if it carries valid information. TDMoIP
concatenates the minicells from all active time slots into a single packet. For time
slots carrying high-level data link control (HDLC) data, such as data for common
channel signaling (CCS), TDMoIP has a special adaptation that encapsulates
stretches of non-idle data.
Delay
The telephony network severely constrains end-to-end delays. ITU-T G.114/G.131
states that one-way transmission times of up to 150 ms are universally acceptable,
assuming adequate echo control is provided. These constraints are not problematic
for TDM networks, where the major component of the end-to-end delay is
electrical propagation time. By contrast, VoIP systems typically add tens of
milliseconds of algorithmic delay, which in practice often approach 100 ms even
before taking routing delays into account. In contrast, TDM pseudowire maps
TDM octets directly into the payload with no voice compression algorithms
required and no resultant algorithmic delay. The buffering latency added by TDM
pseudowire depends on the number of cells per packet but is typically in the single
millisecond range.

Timing Recovery
Native TDM networks rely on hierarchical distribution of timing. Somewhere in
the network there is at least one extremely accurate primary reference clock with a
long-term accuracy of 1 x 10-11. This node, which offers Stratum 1 accuracy,
provides the reference clock to secondary nodes with Stratum 2 accuracy. The
secondary nodes then provide a time reference to Stratum 3 nodes. This hierarchy
of time synchronization is essential for the proper functioning of the network as a
whole.

Common Clock Source

Packets in the PSN reach their destination with delay that has a random
component, known as packet delay variation (PDV). When emulating TDM
transport on such a network, this randomness may be overcome by placing the
TDM packets into a jitter buffer from which data can be read out at a constant rate
for delivery to TDM end-user equipment. The problem is that the TDM source
time reference is no longer available, and the precise rate at which the data are to
be "clocked out" of the jitter buffer is unknown.

Clocking Options

In certain cases timing may be derived from the TDM equipment at both ends of
the PW. Since each of these clocks is highly accurate, they necessarily agree to
high order. The problem arises when at most one side of the TDM
pseudowire tunnel has a highly accurate time standard. For ATM networks, which
define a physical layer that carries timing, the synchronous residual time stamp
(SRTS) method may be used; IP/MPLS networks, however, do not define the
physical layer and thus cannot specify the accuracy of its clock.

Hence, in many cases the only alternative is to attempt to recover the clock based
exclusively on the TDM pseudowire traffic, a technology known as "adaptive
clock recovery". This is possible since the source TDM device is producing bits at
a constant rate determined by its clock, although this rate is hidden by the PDV.
The task of clock recovery is thus an "averaging" process that negates the effect of
the random PDV and captures the average rate of transmission of the original bit
stream.

Single Point Clock Source

Handling Packet Loss

While proper application of traffic engineering and quality of service (QoS) is
expected to minimize packet loss, packets will at times arrive at the egress out of
order. They may also have been dropped altogether within the PSN. The TDM
pseudowire control word described above includes a 16-bit sequence number for
detecting and handling lost and mis-ordered packets. In the case of lost packets,
TDM pseudowire requires insertion of interpolation packets to maintain TDM
timing. Misordered packets may be either reordered or dropped and interpolated.
While the insertion of arbitrary packets may be sufficient to maintain the TDM
timing, in voice applications packet loss can cause gaps or errors that result in
choppy, annoying, or even unintelligible speech. The precise effect of packet loss
on voice quality and the development of packet loss concealment algorithms have
been the subject of detailed study in the VoIP community, but their results are not
directly applicable to the TDM pseudowire case. This is because VoIP packets
typically contain between 80 samples (10 ms) and 240 samples (30 ms) of the
speech signal, while TDM pseudowire packets may contain only a small number of
samples. Since TDM pseudowire packets are so small, it is acceptable to simply
insert a constant value in place of any lost speech samples. Assuming that the input
signal is zero-mean (i.e. contains no DC component), minimal distortion is attained
when this constant is set to zero. Alternatively, more sophisticated approaches call
for optimally predicting the values of missing samples