WiFi Analysis & Reporting Platform
Increased competition in the broadband access services
market in recent years, the attendant price wars of operators, the race of
unlimited tariffs, etc. led to a multiple reduction in the cost of bandwidth
for the subscriber. In fact, the operator began to sell more traffic for less
money, despite the fact that the cost of telecommunication equipment, operating
expenses of the operator, etc. did not undergo such changes. Moreover, the
increased load on the network requires constantly upgrading the infrastructure,
buying equipment of a higher class, and expanding external channels.
Subscribers' requirements for channels provided by operators are also growing
quite seriously. This is due to a large number of online video services, voice
services, mass use of p2p (often the subscriber evaluates the quality of the
channel by the download speed.
EZELINK specialists involved in the modernization of networks of telecom operators often faced situations when the operator was forced to invest heavily in equipment upgrades and channel expansion, but after carrying out these works spurious traffic (for example, BitTorrent and other p2p protocols) again occupied all its free capacity channels and "eaten up" the resources of new equipment. Judging by the traffic profiles of broadband operators, the share of p2p in the total volume of traffic is 60-80%. Moreover, p2p applications, as a rule, behave extremely aggressively, opening a huge number of sessions, plus the recent transition of BitTorrent to UDP transport added fuel to the fire. As a result, p2p application traffic crowds out all other types of traffic, occupying the entire free band. In this scenario, infrastructure upgrades (even major upgrades) help for a short while.
The current situation requires new approaches from the operator, in particular, there is an urgent need to control application traffic. Those. You need to be able, at the service border, or at interfaces with external networks, to isolate the traffic of certain applications and apply certain policies to them. Suppose, in NNN, monitor the loading of external channels and, when certain threshold values are reached, “clamp” p2p traffic, and only it, without degrading the service for other applications. Or it is necessary to provide priority for Flash Video over the same p2p so that subscribers do not complain about the slow download of videos on YouTube.
Telecom equipment vendors have been dealing with this problem for a long time and almost all of them have DPI platforms (Deep Packet Inspection, technology for analyzing application level protocols) among their product lines, which are used for deep packet analysis (up to L7) and application of any actions to traffic certain applications. Such equipment, as a rule, is a high-performance hardware platform that actually analyzes real-time traffic and remote servers that run management software, policy making, reporting generators and provide interfaces for connecting to external systems. Regardless of the particular vendor, DPI devices are designed to provide minimal packet delay when processing traffic. The delay can be less than 1 ms.
In the process of evolution, DPI devices have acquired additional and extremely useful functionality. They can divide traffic into zones, for example local, external, etc. using policies depending on the direction of traffic. Now you can work with specific subscribers, manage application traffic within a specific subscriber session, and therefore they can record the use of services and quote subscription services.
With this functionality, today DPI devices can replace BRAS devices, at least for IPoE subscribers, because:
it is possible to "identify" a particular subscriber in a variety of ways, including DHCP and RADIUS, respectively identify the traffic of this subscriber there is the possibility of interacting with external systems (billing mediators, pre-paid platforms, etc.) to request quotas for the service for a particular subscriber (in addition to a diverse set of APIs and widespread RADIUS, there is also DIAMETER Gx / Gy), which allows realizing full prepaid services
It is possible to keep records of a subscription session, including separate accounting for various services Thus, all the BRAS functionality can be implemented on a DPI device (at the moment, the only exception is the termination of PPPoE sessions, in the case of the PPPoE model). Those. on one device, you can work with both authorization and accounting of subscribers, manage application traffic within the subscriber session (for example, give 2Mbps traffic sold to it a higher priority for traffic from YouTube, just http browsing, over spurious traffic like p2p, etc.) , and manage application traffic globally.
Reporting tools, which all DPI platforms have, will allow the operator to see what kind of traffic, where and where, it processes. There are opportunities to build graphs and charts indicating application traffic (YouTube, BitTorrent, Secure BitTorrent, Skype, HTTP, and many others), build reports on which sites are most popular with subscribers (Top URL's) or the subscriber’s rating for traffic consumption.
Due to the fact that a DPI device can allocate traffic to a particular subscriber, it becomes possible to create completely new services. For example, if a subscriber is subscribed to the Parental Control service, then all HTTP Request that he sends can be redirected to the VAS platform responsible for this service. Or, you can redirect all the subscriber’s HTTP traffic to the anti-virus platform, if he is subscribed to the Network Anti-Virus service.
Thus, the operator implementing the DPI platform receives the following advantages:
Protection against overloading of its external channels by “pinching” certain types of traffic. Moreover, for the subscriber, this fact will remain invisible and will not affect it in any way, except with a slight decrease in the download speed in the torrent client. According to statistics, 10% of the most active subscribers generate 90% of the network load, therefore, by limiting a little too much swinging subscribers we will improve everything else. Also, due to unloading channels, the operator receives a delay in expanding uplinks, which is a direct cost savings.
The operator gets the opportunity to "see" the traffic that he processes, up to the traffic of a specific application. The recognition accuracy of traffic varies around 97-98%. Based on the received picture, the operator can more flexibly formulate traffic control policies.
The operator gets the opportunity to introduce new flexible services, both using the DPI platform itself, and redirecting the traffic of subscribers who subscribe to services to VAS platforms. There is the possibility of implementing quota services, for example, with a change in the speed of a subscriber after consuming a certain amount of traffic, services tied to a calendar (special offers on weekends / holidays), providing free access to specific URLs or networks, services with a subscriber redirecting to a specific URL ( e.g. for information / notification purposes) and much more
The operator gets the opportunity to block traffic that is objectionable to him, block URLs on the black list (often prohibited sites, extremist, child porn, etc. get there)
the operator gets the opportunity to recognize hosts in his network infected with trojans and generating spam traffic, or participating in a DDOS attack, with the subsequent blocking of this type of traffic and notification of the subscriber
The ability to fully control traffic taking into account the time of day, both globally and within the subscriber session - restriction of selected applications, including filtering, bandwidth control and number of sessions, prioritization of applications, quota management and traffic accounting for applications
The range of WiFi carrier products contains everything you need to launch and monetize new services, as well as to scale, adapt, and compete as a market leader. EZELINK offers end-to-end products covering multiple market segments enabling carriers to extend their coverage and customer base with profitable returns. It integrates seamlessly with various access and mobile core network vendors using standards-based and open interfaces.
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