Shape and offload traffic, but mind your combo

Manish Singh, Continuous Computing | December 11, 2009

While flat-rate, all-you-can-eat data plans has been critical to the growth of mobile broadband, it has caused mobile data traffic to surge while revenues remain almost flat. Carriers need to add a large amount of extra network capacity, yet profits from these services are insufficient to fund the necessary upgrades.

Operators now are turning to a cocktail of new remedies based on traffic management – but the wrong mixture can prove poisonous. For many, the solution to this decoupling of revenue and capacity appears obvious: LTE, which will provide greater capacity at a lower cost than existing 3G networks. But with mobile broadband traffic doubling every nine months, it has become clear that LTE alone will be insufficient to meet demand.

Operators are now increasingly turning to traffic management, specifically two techniques – traffic shaping and traffic offloading. While all traffic is essentially treated equally, traffic shaping allows operators to prioritize some services over others, thereby improving the consumer’s experience. This is being increasingly delivered using deep packet inspection (DPI) technology.

Simply put, DPI looks “deep” inside data packets and classifies them according to a variety of criteria – all in real time. Operators can then prioritize, rate limit and in extreme scenarios, block different types of traffic. DPI capabilities allow highly accurate identification of network traffic such as BitTorrent, YouTube, Skype, viruses, spam and others, even if these applications use port-hopping, encryption, masking or other behaviors to hide their identity.

Operators can then implement rules-based management and traffic shaping to allow allocation of bandwidth based on criteria like the application (such as VoIP), roaming versus non-roaming, time-of-day, volume or per user. As such, operators can prioritize time-sensitive services such as voice or media streaming.

The other technique, traffic offloading, allows operators to offload internet traffic from their networks at the earliest opportunity so that they don’t have to invest further in increasing capacity at the network core. DPI is again frequently used to differentiate between the traffic that should be offloaded and that which should continue into the core network.

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