Cisco Service Control Capabilities - Cisco SCE 1000 Installation And Configuration Manual

Chapter 1 General Overview

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:
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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
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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).
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—The 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 and robust integration process.
Scalable high-performance service engines—The ability to perform all these operations at wire
speed.
Cisco SCE 1000 2xGBE Installation and Configuration Guide
Cisco Service Control Capabilities
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