User Traffic Control

Parallel to application based policies with APPs traffic control, user based policies enable customer centric traffic management with bandwidth and volume steering per user or profile.

The Vedicis User Traffic Control service tracks a complete view of user’s activity and data usage. A “user” is defined with several network criteria, such as IP address, VLAN,… The term “user” can therefore correspond to a subscriber, a corporate customer, or a group of them, identified by a group of IP addresses, a VLAN, etc. 

Vedicis User Traffic Control service detects IP, VLAN... in the traffic. It then associates dynamically this information to a user (through a connection to the Radius or other specific user DataBase) and user to a profile (through a connection to the PCRF or other DB with profile information).

User bandwidth management

Global bandwidth per user (upstream or downstream) can be shaped and marked, independently of any APPs, by defining:

• The maximum bandwidth available per user

The maximum subscriber bandwidth allocation is set to prevent abusive usage of shared network resources by any specific user profile. This helps as well to define limitation for abnormal traffic to or from a user, for security purpose.

• The minimum bandwidth

The minimum bandwidth per user is commonly used to process all packets below this bandwidth threshold with a maximum priority. This contributes to priviledge any traffic below this limit.

• The average bandwidth

The average bandwidth per user is used to prevent some specific bandwidth intensive APPs (typically P2P) to use all available user bandwidth.

APPs bandwidth and volume management per user

This advanced traffic management feature is based on Apps, defining a set of actions per group of APPs for each user:

• Metering: counters are associated to each user to track the volume exchanged per group of Apps. A micro-quota can be defined to enable Vedicis software to trigger an event, typically to apply a new different profile to a user who would have reached his allowed quota.
• Blocking: all packets belonging to this group of APPs are simply dropped.
• Marking: all packets belonging to this group of APPs are set in a specific traffic class which contains marking and traffic priority parameters,
• Shaping: the cumulative bandwidth of this group of APPs is monitored. A bandwidth limit is then enforced with static shaping (permanent limitation) or dynamic shaping (limitation at peak time).

Adaptative bandwidth management: user fairness & topology awareness

Fairness: bandwidth is dynamically monitored in order to define a “fair bandwidth” available per user, in real time. User bandwidth is then shaped when exceeding this fair value.
Topology awareness: Vedicis User Control service implements “V-Lines”, which represent the network with the various static bottlenecks (Node B for mobile operator, Access for fixed operator). The identifiers of these bottlenecks to create V-Lines are provisioned by each carrier. Vedicis User Control service monitors in real time the traffic in each V-Line, which corresponds to a constrained physical resource to be shared by a pool of users: the Vedicis solution can therefore enforce bandwidth management depending on network congestion. This mechanism extends User fairness capabilities.
 

Personalized services

With Vedicis User Traffic Control solution, Carriers can promote personalized data services with priviledge delivery such as:

• tiered services based on a volume quota and/or bandwidth per user-type and/or per service (p2p, streaming,  ...)
• turbo services with prioritization to boost the connection performance such as gaming or others
• fair usage to efficiently share among customers the available bandwidth
• QOE for video, with video admission control, and real time events such as sports, concerts, …