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Cisco SCE 8000 10GBE Software Configuration Guide
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Chapter 1 Cisco Service Control Overview
Cisco Service Control Capabilities
Cisco Service Control Capabilities
The core of the Cisco service control solution is the network hardware device: the Service control engine
(Cisco SCE). The core capabilities of the Cisco 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 to
maintain the state of each subscriber transmitting traffic through the Cisco 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 through 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 Cisco 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 bandwidth (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 adapt to new services and
applications in the 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 Cisco SCE provides a set of open and well-documented APIs that
allows a quick integration process.
•
Scalable high-performance service engines—The ability to perform all of these operations at wire
speed.
