Intelligent Traffic Management

Traffic Challenges

To provide and maintain a high QoE, CSPs must seize firm control of traffic management on their networks. Given recent trends, traffic on the data plane must be managed more intelligently than before to deliver the best possible subscriber experience. CSPs can accomplish this by optimizing traffic response times and delivery to specialized platforms. This granularity in traffic management and control allows CSPs to implement their business plan on the network. Another challenge CSPs face is scaling the infrastructure to meet growing demand. New multimedia services consume ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth, causing infrastructure costs to increase proportionally. Performance and uptime can suffer, resulting in reduced service usage and subscriber churn that limits revenues and increases support costs.

Intelligent Solution

As a global leader in ITM, the F5 BIG-IP system provides CSPs with strategic points of control that include application and subscriber awareness to intelligently perform traffic steering and optimize other network resources (such as VAS, WAP, and GW). The BIG-IP system employs flexible and high-performance intelligent traffic management, which gives CSPs granular control of the data plane, along with a flexible way to apply their business model to the traffic. This ITM solution enables CSPs to consolidate data plane functionality—traffic steering, DPI, FW, CGNAT—to simplify architecture and new services, and lower capital and operating expenses.

F5’s iRules provides a highly flexible rules engine that enables CSPs to determine exactly how to handle traffic to maximize the QoE. CSPs can use iRules to define traffic steering and set conditions on how traffic is managed and even how elements of the traffic should be defined at certain parts of the data plane. The key to successfully implementing ITM is the ability to enforce the business plan while still maintaining high performance and scalability.

At the heart of this solution is the F5 BIG-IP platform, including the carrier-grade, NEBS-compliant VIPRION Application Delivery Controller (ADC). F5 VIPRION delivers unparalleled capacity, scalability, and performance in terms of throughput, simultaneous connections, and transactions per second. The VIPRION chassis holds up to four hot-swappable blades, each with four or eight processor cores that together deliver up to 72 Gbps of intelligent layer 4–7 throughputs for up to 48 million concurrent sessions. Along with unparalleled capacity, performance, and scalability, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) also optimizes TCP traffic through the F5 TCP Express feature. TCP Express uses patent-pending TCP optimization methodologies to ensure the best performance for CSPs networks. This combination of unprecedented performance and optimization enables the CSP to maintain a competitive edge via network efficiencies and platform differentiators, which can improve profitability and reduce total capital and operating costs of service delivery and network deployments.

Related Documentation for Additional F5 Solutions

F5 products provide multifunction capabilities that eliminate the need for multiple point products while enhancing critical network functions across the application, control, and data planes. This approach simplifies management, reduces operating and capital costs, and improves end-to-end performance for application and service delivery. Using F5 to standardize the strategic points of control within networks expands the opportunities to monetize network services.

Besides providing intelligent traffic management, the F5 product suite offers multifunction capabilities that meet CSP needs for a number of other critical solutions within the same footprint. This approach provides several key advantages to service providers. First, it enables CSPs to consolidate network functions and simplify network architecture rather than using multiple point products from different vendors. Second, the F5 approach enables CSPs to consolidate the management of network functions, which simplifies management of key TCP elements that are crucial for delivery of applications and services. Third, providing multiservice functions within a single F5 platform is more cost-effective than a multiple-product approach. Fourth, the F5 approach improves end-to-end performance and scaling, which creates an infrastructure that allows CSPs to rapidly deliver new, high-quality services and applications to their subscribers.

These other critical solutions for service providers are addressed in more detail in separate profiles:

• Scaling and Securing the Control Plane
• Carrier-Grade NAT and IPv6 Services
• Security for Communication Service Providers
• Application-Aware Services and Cloud Delivery
  
  

^{© 2012 F5 Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. F5, F5 Networks, the F5 logo, BIG-IP, Local Traffic Manager, VIPRION, TCP Express, and iRules are trademarks of F5 Networks, Inc. in the U.S. and in certain other countries.}