The Arrival of Application-Intelligent Networking

June 18th, 2013

At Sonus, we’ve been talking to customers about the benefits of Unified Communications (UC) for some time now. And then a funny thing happened: we rolled out a worldwide UC solution at the beginning of the year on the Microsoft Lync platform and found out we didn’t necessarily talk to each other more. We used to simply email; now we collaborate – video conference, data share, etc. Case in point: what used to take six emails now gets edited, finalized and published all in one session. In the first month since deploying Lync, the number of internal Sonus videoconferences rose 50% and the number of participants and total minutes for those calls nearly doubled.

If you’re an enterprise, that’s good news. Videoconferences result in more meaningful collaboration, faster problem resolution and higher employee productivity. If you’re an enterprise CIO, however, increased video traffic is a cause for alarm. It consumes more bandwidth, places more demands on the network and introduces a host of interoperability and quality issues.

What can enterprises—and, by extension, the communications service providers who serve them—do ensure that UC doesn’t bring their network to their knees with high-bandwidth video? Currently, their options look like this:

  • The Bite-The-Bullet Approach: Buy/build more network capacity than you think you’ll need, and hope the benefits outweigh the cost;
  • The Best-Possible-Effort Approach: Use a session border controller (SBC) to enforce quality at a session level and hope the network resources in the call path can support it;

While the second option is more reasonable in terms of cost, enforcing video quality as a session-only level is ultimately a crap shoot. The SBC typically sees only as far as the next hop, and so it makes QoS decisions based on the conditions present at the next stop rather than the whole journey. So, for example, if I’m talking to a customer in Texas and I decide that I want to upgrade our voice call to a video call so I can share my whiteboard with them, that journey will include at least three networks (mine, my service provider and the customer’s network), and my SBC will need to make the decision to allow or deny that call without knowing whether the customer’s network can support it.

But what if the SBC could view and enforce policies not just on the next hop, but along the entire call path—even along multiple networks? That’s the idea behind a new solution that Sonus and Juniper Networks have developed. By opening the communications between the Sonus SBC and the Juniper SRC (Session and Resource Controller), the two elements working in tandem provide a foundation for application-intelligent working. Specifically, the SBC can now see and enforce session policies along deep into the call path by passing them along to the SRC, while the SRC in turn allows the SBC to make routing/policy decisions based on an end-to-end view of the route. Not only is the timing of a solution like this right, but it doesn’t require enterprises or service providers to reconfigure their networks—it’s a value-add of elements that, in many cases, are already deployed in their network.

If you want to learn more,read the recent RCR Wireless byline on this topic.