Success Story | High Throughput Information Extraction Using Packet Processing Technology

Introduction

It's no secret that today's networks are becoming more complex and overloaded with the multitude of applications that end users have come to expect. The promise of the converged network, along with high bandwidth applications such as IPTV, telephony, and consumer video, are driving traffic volumes up considerably. As carriers migrate to an all-IP (Internet Protocol) environment, these bandwidth-intensive applications are significantly increasing network traffic volumes.

According to a recent Yankee Group report on Tier 1 operator backbones, estimated IP traffic growth rates will remain constant at 85 to 100 percent per year for the next three to five years.

Using DPI for Information Extraction

In order for operators to understand, manage, and control this increased traffic; acquire granular knowledge of application and subscriber behaviors; and ultimately monetize the information traveling over their network, more and more service providers are deploying Information Extraction and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) solutions. By some accounts, the future success of the converged IP network - including push content, targeted advertising, subscriber personalization, horizontal application architectures, and complete subscriber profiles - is highly dependent on DPI-enabled intelligence gathered and drawn from the network.

To meet the demand for higher performance systems capable of successfully performing Information Extraction and DPI functionalities, telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) have stepped up to provide network operators with integrated solutions on standards-based hardware platforms that offer lightening-fast speeds, rock-solid reliability, and incredible scalability in order to receive ample return on investment (ROI). Continuous Computing's FlexPacket™ ATCA-PP50 packet processing blade provides the highest level of performance, flexibility, and reliability in a standards-based offering to successfully implement new, advanced Information Extraction and DPI features while also accelerating TEMs' time-to-market.

The PP50 packet processing blade provides superior performance via a number of important architectural innovations:

• One or two discrete multi-core RMI XLR732 MIPS64 packet processors
• Each XLR732 processor provides eight multi-threaded cores with four 32 virtual cores per blade)
• Each processor has a built-in security co-processor capable of handling up to 10Gbps of bulk encryption / decryption (20Gpbs per blade)
• Each processor can support up to 8GB of memory (16GB per blade)
• The blade includes access to a TCAM (Ternary Content Addressable Memory) and content processors via mezzanines

PP50 and Qosmos ixEngine

Outstanding performance and flexibility of the PP50 were the main reasons that Qosmos, an industry leader in high level Information Extraction solutions based on advanced DPI technology, chose the blade from Continuous Computing to support their Qosmos ixEngine, an Information Extraction and DPI Software Development Kit. Qosmos ixEngine enables real-time information and content extraction to provide deep and accurate knowledge and understanding of IP networks at the protocol, application, service, and user levels. Qosmos ixEngine can recognize and analyze more than 300 different communication protocols representing thousands of applications, and in fact can extract more than 3,000 characteristics from protocols and applications on any IP network whether it be public, private, fixed, or mobile.

Examples of protocols and applications recognized by Qosmos ixEngine include:

• Mobile telephony protocols: GPRS, UMTS-HSDPA, UMA, etc.
• Audio / video streaming: RTP, RTSP, WMP, iTunes, YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.
• VoIP protocols: H323, SIP, MGCP, etc.
• Business applications: Citrix, Oracle, SAP, MS Exchange, McAfee, etc.
• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications: eMule, BitTorrent, Kazaa, etc.
• Network protocols: TCP-IP, DNS, DHCP, etc.
• Instant Messaging applications: Skype, MSN, Gtalk, etc.
• Web e-mail services: Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, etc.

Types of information extracted by Qosmos ixEngine include:

• Service classification: protocol and encapsulation information
• Performance: bandwidth usage, volumes, delays
• Usages: URLs, IMSI, type of attached document, call duration
• Identifiers: caller, callee, etc.

The joint solution of Continuous Computing's FlexPacket ATCA-PP50 and Qosmos ixEngine provides TEMs with unparalleled performance and can help them accelerate their time-to-market. The combined offering also enables TEMs to focus on their core competencies, providing value-add to operators on the service side of the roll-out as they deploy "deeper" DPI technology that understands, manages, and controls traffic and applications traveling across their next-generation IP networks. The in-depth network knowledge gleaned through DPI and Information Extraction allow operators to create a wide array of value-added services and applications, such as service usage analysis, customer experience and quality of service management, subscriber profiling, smart network optimization, VoIP charging and monitoring, usage- or content-based billing, revenue assurance, and fraud prevention.

In particular, DPI and Information Extraction allow operators to extract key performance indicators (KPI) from networks to build richer quality of service (QoS) measurement and troubleshooting solutions specialized for the carrier market.

Improving Customer Satisfaction

With the PP50 and Qosmos ixEngine, service providers can analyze both signaling and voice transfer sessions and facilitate correlations between protocols to enable mean opinion score (MOS) computing per call, per group of calls, per location, etc. Most importantly, the high performance PP50 blade provides the best possible performance and scalability to allow for a better customer experience. As customers demand more high-bandwidth, high-performance, latency-sensitive, and personalized IP services accessible via reliable connectivity from anywhere and at anytime, service providers are seeking more ways to improve QoS to maintain their competitive edge. Together the PP50 and Qosmos ixEngine meet this market need.

One method to increased QoS is through innovative Information Extraction and DPI solutions that analyze network behavior and pinpoint the cause of delays to deliver a clearer understanding of how subscribers are using the network. QoS is becoming increasingly more important to network operators that have come to the realization that retaining customers by delivering higher satisfaction rates is much less expensive than acquiring new customers. DPI and Information Extraction have additional advantages as well: the truly granular knowledge gained can provide greater insight to network usage, enabling operators to construct more efficient utilization models while simultaneously controlling costs. Service providers can then use this information to supply their customers with high-value applications based on information extracted from their IP networks in real-time.

Conclusion

High bandwidth applications are driving traffic volumes up considerably and as a result more and more network operators are deploying Information Extraction and DPI solutions to glean critical data. Service providers use these tools to optimize network performance, shape traffic flows, identify and track potential security threats, increase QoS and QoE, or build usage- or content-based billing models. To successfully deploy and utilize Information Extraction and DPI solutions, leading-edge hardware platforms such as the highly scalable FlexPacket ATCA-PP50 packet processing blade from Continuous Computing are necessary to provide the performance, flexibility, and reliability needed to support today's high bandwidth applications. Continuous Computing has set the bar for high standards and superior performance that network operators around the world have come to expect for efficiently processing applications such as IPTV, consumer Internet video, and mobile telephony.

For more information on the PP50 and/or the Qosmos ixEngine solutions, please contact your Continuous Computing Sales Director or visit www.ccpu.com