Two and a half years ago I reported on the first phases of our project to measure the performance of our proof-of-concept Radio Network Controller (RNC) in an article entitled “How to use modular building blocks to develop an RNC system” in the Spring 2004 issue of Embedded Computing Design. At that time we had determined Intel Pentium M processors were a better choice than Intel Pentium 4 processors based on the Intel Netburst microarchitecture for the type of intense signaling plane workloads presented by an RNC.

In addition, processor cycle accurate modeling of the user plane software running on the Intel IXP2800 network processors had shown the user plane (sometimes termed data plane) for a 500K subscriber RNC would require only 12 Intel NetStructure IXB2800 3G boards with their integrated Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) user plane software. This article discusses how we completed the rest of the benchmark efforts and summarizes the major findings.