1-3
Cisco SCE 2000 4xGBE Installation and Configuration Guide
OL-7824-07
Chapter 1 General Overview
The SCE Platform
•
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.
The SCE Platform
The SCE family of programmable network devices is capable of performing application-layer
stateful-flow inspection of IP traffic, and controlling that traffic based on configurable rules. The SCE
platform is a purpose-built network device that uses ASIC components and RISC processors to go
beyond packet counting and delve deeper into the contents of network traffic. Providing programmable,
stateful inspection of bidirectional traffic flows and mapping these flows with user ownership, the SCE
platforms provide real-time classification of network usage. This information provides the basis of the
SCE platform advanced traffic-control and bandwidth-shaping functionality. Where most bandwidth
shaper functionality ends, the SCE platform provides more control and shaping options, including:
•
Layer 7 stateful wire-speed packet inspection and classification
•
Robust support for over 600 protocols and applications, including:
–
General—HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, TELNET, NNTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, WAP, and others
–
P2P file sharing—FastTrack-KazaA, Gnutella, BitTorrent, Winny, Hotline, eDonkey,
DirectConnect, Piolet, and others
–
P2P VoIP—Skype, Skinny, DingoTel, and others
–
Streaming and Multimedia—RTSP, SIP, HTTP streaming, RTP/RTCP, and others
•
Programmable system core for flexible reporting and bandwidth control
•
Transparent network and BSS/OSS integration into existing networks
•
Subscriber awareness that relates traffic and usage to specific customers
illustrates a common deployment of an SCE platform in a network.
