Development of System Level Computational Platform for IP-BTS Telecom Application

IP-BTS (Internet Protocol Based Base Transceiver Station) is a small computing hardware module designed for integration into an industry standard tower PC housing which provides a complete GSM Access Point. It is used to optimize cost of transmission line for high density multi-band base stations. This paper describes the detailed procedure to develop system level boot loader software (universal boot loader-u-boot) for IP-BTS which is a customized hardware with PowerPC based processor board running on RTLinux operating system. This paper also discusses the brief presentation of the customized hardware platform at system level and the boot loader software development procedure for embedded telecom application IP-BTS. Designing suitable boot software at system or boot level is a complex and challenging task which is included in development of an embedded system for telecom applications. The boot loader connects application software through customized hardware and Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). It is not only responsible for initialization of the processor board and other module of IP-BTS software also upgrades operating system images and IP-BTS software versions. The early initialization code is always developed in the processor's native assembly language. In this paper we presented detailed procedure to transplant boot loader (u-boot) on Power PC based customized board and tested successfully with results.