Cisco Service Control Capabilities

The core of the Cisco service control solution is the 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—Ability to map between IP flows and a specific subscriber to maintain the state of each subscriber transmitting traffic through the SCE platform and to enforce the appropriate policy on the traffic for this subscriber.

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

Application awareness—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—Ability to perform advanced control functions, including granular bandwidth (BW) metering and shaping, quota management, and redirection, using application-layer, stateful, real-time traffic transaction processing. This feature requires highly adaptive protocol and application-level intelligence.

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

Programmability allows new services to be deployed quickly and provides an easy upgrade path for network, application, or service growth.

Robust and flexible back-office integration—Ability to integrate with existing third-party systems at the service provider, including provisioning systems, subscriber repositories, billing systems, and OSS systems. The SCE provides a set of open and well-documented APIs that allows a quick integration process.

Scalable high-performance service engines—Ability to perform all of these operations at wire speed.