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Chapter 1 General Overview
Cisco Service Control Capabilities
Cisco SCE 1000 2xGBE Installation and Configuration Guide
1-2 OL-7821-05
Service Control for Broadband Service Providers
Service providers of any access technology (DSL, cable, mobile, and so on) targeting residential
and business consumers must find new ways to get maximum leverage from their existing
infrastructure, while differentiating their offerings with enhanced IP services.
The Cisco Service Control Application for Broadband adds a new layer of service intelligence and
control to existing networks that can:
• Report and analyze network traffic at subscriber and aggregate level for capacity planning
• Provide customer-intuitive tiered application services and guarantee application SLAs
• Implement different service levels for different types of customers, content, or applications
• Identify network abusers who are violating the Acceptable Use Policy
• Identify and manage peer-to-peer, NNTP (news) traffic, and spam abusers
• Enforce the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)
• Integrate Service Control solutions easily with existing network elements and BSS/OSS
systems
Cisco Service Control Capabilities
The core of the Cisco Service Control solution is the purpose-built 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—The ability to map between IP flows and a specific subscriber in
order to maintain the state of each subscriber transmitting traffic through the SCE
platform and to enforce the appropriate policy on this subscriber’s traffic.
Subscriber awareness is achieved either through dedicated integrations with subscriber
management repositories, such as a DHCP or a Radius server, or via sniffing of Radius or
DHCP traffic.
• Application awareness—The 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—The ability to perform advanced control
functions, including granular BW metering and shaping, quota management, and redirection,
using application-layer stateful real-time traffic transaction processing. This requires highly
adaptive protocol and application-level intelligence.
• Programmability—The ability to quickly add new protocols and easily adapt to new services
and applications in the ever-changing service provider environment. Programmability is
achieved using the Cisco Service Modeling Language (SML).