Cisco Cisco Broadband Access Center for Cable 4.0

Increased channel capacity via channel bonding

Enhanced network security

Enhanced multicast capabilities

New service offerings

This release enhances these existing features in BAC to facilitate IPv6 transport:

Lease Query—You can request current IP address information directly from the Network Registrar 
DHCP servers in a provisioning group. This feature, thus, provides:

IP address information for device resets and management.

Reporting details of IPv4 and IPv6 devices.

You can also configure the IP addresses of the DHCP servers in the provisioning group using an 
autoconfiguration mechanism, which makes for easier network administration. 

TFTP service—The DPE’s high-performance TFTP service allows on-delivery customization that 
DOCSIS uses to mix time-sensitive information into the file that is to be delivered. This BAC release 
enhances the TFTP service to:

Support IPv6 transport.

Support compression of dynamic TFTP files that a DPE caches, thus enhancing DPE 
performance.

Provide an optional block-size option, which specifies the number of data octets and allows the 
client and server to negotiate a block size more applicable to the network medium. The 
block-size option in BAC complies with RFC 2348.

Maintain statistics for the number of TFTP packets that are processed for TFTPv4 and TFTPv6.

ToD (Time of Day) service—The DPE’s ToD service provides high-performance UDP 
implementation of RFC 868. This service provides:

Support for IPv6 transport. 

Statistics for the number of ToD packets that are processed for ToDv4 and ToDv6.

SNMP support—The BAC RDU supports SNMP management over IPv6 to provide device 
disruption for IPv6 cable modems and STBs. 

This BAC release introduces support for the video STB, specifically the RNG-200 STB, which is based 
on the evolving OpenCable Application Platform.

This BAC release provides:

Massive scalability of the RDU and the DPEs in your network. The RDU can support up to 60 
million devices, and a provisioning group can support 2 million devices, of which 500,000 can be 
Secure PacketCable devices.

Enhanced DPE synchronization with the RDU, rendering the process in the background so that the 
RDU is not overloaded with synchronization requests. The process is also updated to support 
requests for the DPE based on the DHCP Unique Identifier (DUID) of an IPv6 device.