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Cisco SCE 2000 4xGBE Installation and Configuration Guide
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Chapter 1 General Overview
Cisco Service Control Capabilities
As the downturn in the telecommunications industry has shown, IP service providers’ business models
need to be reworked to make them profitable. Having spent billions of dollars to build ever larger data
links, providers have incurred massive debts and faced rising costs. At the same time, access and
bandwidth have become commodities where prices continually fall and profits disappear. Service
providers have realized that they must offer value-added services to derive more revenue from the traffic
and services running on their networks. However, capturing real profits from IP services requires more
than simply running those services over data links; it requires detailed monitoring and precise, real-time
control and awareness of services as they are delivered. Cisco provides Service Control solutions that
allow the service provider to bridge this gap.
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:
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Report and analyze network traffic at subscriber and aggregate level for capacity planning
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Provide customer-intuitive tiered application services and guarantee application SLAs
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Implement different service levels for different types of customers, content, or applications
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Identify network abusers who are violating the Acceptable Use Policy
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Identify and manage peer-to-peer, NNTP (news) traffic, and spam abusers
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Enforce the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)
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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.
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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.
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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.
