The Carrier Interest Group (CIG) creates the standards and APIs needed to enable major international carriers and Internet service providers (ISPs) to commission more secure and more flexible internet access devices (IAD), such as WiFi routers and gateways.
It’s aim is to enable multi-vendor strategies and faster time-to-market by making software investment easily portable across SoCs, chipsets as well as middleware stacks and vendor software.
The CIG is currently active in two different API projects.
Low-level API
The prpl low-level API is meant to reduce the time and effort required to integrate a middleware stack with a new SoC and BSP by up to 80%. Investments on middleware stacks and software will be reusable across devices and access technologies.
The low-level API does so by harmonizing the APIs of items such as WiFi, DSL, Fibre as well as DOCSIS and peripherals across the different SoC vendors. This will allow middleware stacks to rely on a single set of APIs regardless of the chipset model and manufacturer. Prpl does not aim to create new APIs, but formalizes existing proposals and designs.
Ultimately, software companies and ISPs will be able to focus on the features and quality of their customer-facing software rather than devoting much of their resources to driver and low-level integration.
The low-level API group meets on a weekly basis.
See here for the first set of APIs that are proposed to become official prpl Low Level APIs.
Software Stack Independent API
Similar to the low-level API, the Software Stack Independent API (SSI) will bring about huge savings in time and resources for ISPs and software vendors alike, by making ISP-specific and consumer touch-points, such as a device’s web interface, portable across vendor stacks.
The SSI standardizes interaction with the middleware in a simple, lightweight data model. Device management, web interfaces as well as completely new services will be able to rely on this API to query, trigger and configure the underlying middleware stack.
The SSI is designed to independent of the underlying software stack, therefore it can be added transparently to both OpenWrt/Linux based systems as well as RDK-B.
The Software-Stack-Independent-API group meets on a biweekly basis to develop the API linking the middleware and higher layer applications and services.