APPs Traffic Control

Traffic knowledge and management is key to ensure QoS. However a step further is needed to have a clear impact on Quality of Experience. The APPs Traffic Control service is dedicated to traffic flow steering, for fine grained broadband management based on several parameters, that include OTT services and protocols.

Smart pipe creation with flexible APPs definition

Carriers are in position to define and declare an APP based upon following parameters:

• Ports  (example: SSH: port 22)                           
• Standard Applications & Protocols (L4-L7 traffic. Example: Skype, Adaptive streaming)
• AS (Autonomous System),
• Hostnames.

Any APPs may be defined depending on:

• Virtual Networks

Any network information (VLAN, TOS value, IP range…) can be retrieved from the flow and used to classify traffic into several “virtual networks”. Various policies can be applied to the different virtual networks, which allows for example to manage differently bandwidth control for the “consumer traffic” and for the “enterprise traffic”.

• Traffic direction: Uplink / downlink

Uplink and downlink flows are differentiated to give more accuracy and policy effectiveness.

APPs Policy control & enforcement

the APPs Traffic Control solution delivers congestion management functionalities to allocate bandwidth to traffic flows according to multiple parameters with shaping, marking or blocking policies.

• APPs blocking

Any APP may be blocked for traffic management reason or regulation purpose. For instance, all VoIP protocols (SIP, H323, Skype, MGCP) can be blocked independently from any other actions.

• APPs marking

APPs may be marked with QoS tagging, like DSCP, MPLS or VLAN. This marking is then used by traditional routers for prioritization when and where congestion occurs.

• Static/dynamic shaping

Two levels of traffic shaping with bandwidth limitation are implemented:
Static (or permanent) shaping means that the bandwidth limitation is always enforced for a specific APP or a group of APPs. For instance this allows making sure that P2P never exceeds 30% of the physically available bandwidth.
Dynamic (or congestion) shaping means that traffic shaping occurs only if congestion is detected at Vedicis platform level. This may be used to limit some bandwidth intensive APPs (FTP, P2P…) to a certain threshold in order to keep some bandwidth available for time sensitive applications, that are badly impacted at peak time.
 

Congestion management

Flexible APPs definition and management enable carriers to focus on clear bandwidth intensive traffic flows to limit their negative impact on user quality of experience with time sensitive applications (browsing, video streaming…).
Static and dynamic shaping coupled with marking result in congestion relief at multiple levels in the network.
 

Peering/Transit management

With precise applications and protocols steering, fixed operators are empowered to control precisely the traffic at peering/transit points.