The Need of Application Contro
The Challenges of Application Control
The Application Control Solution of GenieNRM

• The Need of L7 Application Control
  Improving profitability is one of the most important goals for service providers. The key to profitability is reducing their operational costs and capital investment to leverage the existing network resources to beat competitors’ prices for providing services to their subscribers. Therefore, it has always been the focus of service providers that how to make the most out of their network assets by providing and guaranteeing the QoS of premium services and at the same time restrain the non-revenue-generating, bandwidth-hogging applications.
  Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking has emerged as an increasingly popular way of broadband subscribers to share digital content such as music and videos, and an increasing problematic cause of bandwidth bottlenecks for most service providers. P2P traffic has three unique characteristics such as bandwidth hogging, persistent connections, and connecting on-net/off-net hosts world-wide indiscriminatingly. These characteristics of P2P traffic makes service providers and campus facing a few operational challenges including.
  • Throwing more bandwidth at the problem is a temporary and expensive solution, as P2P traffic grows to consume the capacity available;
  • P2P applications automatically re-connect to finish downloading huge files without human interference, which can consume bandwidth 24 hours indifferently making the boundary of peak-hours and off-peak-hours disappeared;
  • High percentage of P2P traffic leaves a service provider's network in search of P2P hosts around the globe to exchange digital contents. This off-net traffic does not generate any extra revenue for operators and instead lead to high peering (transit) costs.
• The Challenges of L7 Application Control
  Before having a traffic policy control solution, network managers would try to use conventional network devices to solve the issue of bandwidth management. For example, they would block a specific port usually used by a P2P application in order to block the P2P traffic. However, this measure only leads the diversion of the P2P traffic to other random ports or even making use of well-known ports of other applications (e.g. port 80 of HTTP) to avoid the blocking. Another approach is to block the traffic from identified P2P service servers, but some P2P applications would use proxy server to hide from the identification.
  Therefore, deep packet inspection (DPI) has become the necessity to help fight P2P traffic inflation. DPI technology identifies and classifies data packets at wire speed and it goes beyond Layer 7 awareness to enable deep analysis of static and dynamic protocols, application signatures and content patterns. With DPI technology, network operators can accurately and effectively block or control P2P application traffic.
  
  
• The Application Control Solution of GenieNRM
  GenieNRM’s layer-7 deep packet inspection solution, GenieNPC, is capable of identifying and controlling not only P2P applications but also VoIP, streaming applications and all port-based applications. In addition to controlling bandwidth-greedy applications, GenieNPC also enables service providers and network campus operators to deploy bandwidth usage policies, provide QoS guarantee for critical services and roll-out tiered services to the users.
  Key capabilities of GenieNPC are as follows:
1. 10G based State-of-Art Network Processor for extremely fast packet processing performance
2. High-port density with maximum of 8-port configuration
3. Identifies and classifies layer-2/3/4/7 network packets, including all port-based applications, VoIP applications, and 20+ types of P2P applications, including Bit Torrent, Edonkey, Gnutella, Kazaa, Skype, and WinNY
4. Simple firewall-like bandwidth control policies
5. Hardware-based token-bucket style 3-tier traffic bandwidth control profiles with time-based scheduler
6. BGP support for on-net/off-net traffic differentiation
7. Netflow v5 compatible traffic statistics export
8. Flow-based traffic visibility and analysis with Top-N, Top-talker, in-depth traffic analysis functions.