Cisco Systems SCE 2000 4/8xFE manual Cisco Service Control Capabilities

Chapter 1 General Overview

Cisco Service Control Capabilities

Service Control for Broadband Service Providers

Service providers of any access technology (DSL, cable, mobile, and so on) targeting residential and business consumers must find new ways to get maximum leverage from their existing infrastructure, while differentiating their offerings with enhanced IP services.

The Cisco Service Control Application for Broadband adds a new layer of service intelligence and control to existing networks that can:

•Report and analyze network traffic at subscriber and aggregate level for capacity planning

•Provide customer-intuitive tiered application services and guarantee application SLAs

•Implement different service levels for different types of customers, content, or applications

•Identify network abusers who are violating the Acceptable Use Policy

•Identify and manage peer-to-peer, NNTP (news) traffic, and spam abusers

•Enforce the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)

•Integrate Service Control solutions easily with existing network elements and BSS/OSS systems

Cisco Service Control Capabilities

The core of the Cisco Service Control solution is the purpose-built network hardware device: the Service Control Engine (SCE). The core capabilities of the SCE platform, which support a wide range of applications for delivering Service Control solutions, include:

•Subscriber and application awareness—Application-level drilling into IP traffic for real-time understanding and controlling of usage and content at the granularity of a specific subscriber.

•Subscriber awareness—The ability to map between IP flows and a specific subscriber in order to maintain the state of each subscriber transmitting traffic through the SCE platform and to enforce the appropriate policy on this subscriber’s traffic.

Subscriber awareness is achieved either through dedicated integrations with subscriber management repositories, such as a DHCP or a Radius server, or via sniffing of Radius or DHCP traffic.

•Application awareness—The ability to understand and analyze traffic up to the application protocol layer (Layer 7).

For application protocols implemented using bundled flows (such as FTP, which is implemented using Control and Data flows), the SCE platform understands the bundling connection between the flows and treats them accordingly.

•Application-layer, stateful, real-time traffic control—The ability to perform advanced control functions, including granular BW metering and shaping, quota management, and redirection, using application-layer stateful real-time traffic transaction processing. This requires highly adaptive protocol and application-level intelligence.

•Programmability—The ability to quickly add new protocols and easily adapt to new services and applications in the ever-changing service provider environment. Programmability is achieved using the Cisco Service Modeling Language (SML).

Cisco SCE 2000 4/8xFE Installation and Configuration Guide

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