Creanord EchoNEWS: October 2009
Welcome to the October issue of Creanord EchoNEWS. Creanord EchoNEWS aims to keep you informed of the latest developments at Creanord
and in the fields of automated Ethernet service delivery, SLA assurance and Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM).
In this October issue we will take a closer look at Intelligent Ethernet Traffic Management and the advantages offered by the MetroNID's and EtherNID's traffic shaping features over traditional traffic shaping. In addition we will
introduce to you a new European Metro Ethernet Group and we wish you a happy halloween!
European Metro Ethernet Group
The European Metro Ethernet Group at LinkedIn is the leading education, business and networking forum for Ethernet networking and services professionals. Idea is to network, discuss opportunities & industry market trends, share experiences, challenges faced and the journey traversed.
You can join this open group through the LinkedIn service.
Intelligent Ethernet Traffic Management is a headache cure that works for both End Customer and Service Provider
Enterprises and government agencies are thriving for enhancing productivity. To meet and exceed the productivity goals CxO's are constantly seeking for new ways to utilize high performance Ethernet networks as a primary highway to reach a variety of corporate services.
So far so good. We all know the feeling when our web meeting or VoIP is stuttering or we cannot access the Cloud Computing service we really need at that precise moment. But guess how the CxO's are feeling when a whole department is sitting in coffee room raging about how they
cannot work due to a network problem? Starting the tendering process again is the first idea that crosses their mind in addition to reclamation.
Service Providers can solve the problem simply by implementing Intelligent Ethernet Traffic Management methods. This not only keeps the existing customers happy but also gives the Service Provider a competitive edge. New premium services enabled by these methods and including SLAs outlining QoS requirements translate quickly to improved bottom line.
Highly attractive services also lures new customers from competitors. All above are very welcomed assets within any sales department.
The Need for QoS Management
In an unconditioned Ethernet or IP/MPLS connection all packets are treated equally: when there is an excess of traffic it is "tail dropped" by a switch or access platform, an effect especially disruptive to TCP traffic, while also causing dropouts in VoIP and video streams.
Increasingly this "dumb-pipe" approach is impacting businesses and mobile operators who are migrating towards packet-based connectivity and applications.
Intelligent Ethernet Traffic Management and Hierarchical QoS play a key role as the digital content driving the business must be readily available with guaranteed quality.
QoS Management at the Service Demarcation Point
To effectively enable carrier-grade services over packet-based infrastructures, service providers need to implement a QoS management (traffic conditioning) scheme ensuring that critical, real-time applications are allocated proper priority from end-to-end.
As all network resources are impacted by poor traffic management, throttling customer traffic at the customer access and base station backhaul reduces traffic congestion and network element processing overhead in provider edge.
Revenue-driving SLAs
One natural way to achieve Revenue-driving SLAs is to apply QoS management at each service demarcation point, defined by a Network Interface Device (NID) located at customer premises, mobile base station sites and hand-off points between interconnecting networks.
By conditioning traffic at these network boundaries, Service Providers assume control over traffic entering and leaving the network, enabling the best possible QoS and SLAs.
Bear in mind that SLAs do not need to be just an agreement on paper anymore. Creanord EchoVault enables SLA and service performance details to be presented online in easy to use web dashboards, something that every CxO highly appreciates.
QoS Management Techniques
Bandwidth Policing
A common, simple form of QoS management is bandwidth policing, also known as rate limiting. Bandwidth policing simply drops any excess packets that exceed the policy defined for a particular flow. However, there are shortcomings to simple bandwidth regulation.
If the demand for a service increases, or the profile doesn't accurately reflect service requirements, QoS will suffer.
Hierarchical QoS and Traffic Shaping
Hierarchical QoS (H-QoS) schemes are designed to provide highly efficient use of access and network bandwidth by implementing traffic shaping techniques in addition to simple rate limiting. Unlike bandwidth policing that simply drops excess traffic,
shaping is designed expressly to avoid packet loss by selectively buffering traffic, effectively smoothing out bursty traffic to "right-size" it to the bandwidth available.
Zero-Latency & Delay-Optimized Shaping Techniques
To shape traffic, packets first must be inspected and characterized (the first source of delay), then priority queued for transmission (an additional delay dependent on buffer size). With these constraints, it is commonly assumed that traffic shaping always
introduces delay (and to a lesser degree, jitter) to real-time applications, necessarily imparting an impact on QoS.
Packet inspection delays can be virtually eliminated by silicon-based packet processing architectures that, unlike network processor-based designs, do not require store-and-forward buffering to characterize packets. Since hardware-based processing is done
"on the wire", the highest-priority flows can continue in transit without any buffering or shaping delays. This "fast-through" technique is also known as a real-time queue.
Even with the availability of a real-time queue, lower-priority traffic still needs to be buffered and processed to shape the remaining traffic. To reduce queue-related delays, a new shaping algorithm known as
BLUE has been developed
that offers significant performance improvements over the commonly implemented RED algorithm.
Implementing Zero-Latency Traffic Shaping & H-QoS at the Service Demarc
With these new advances in traffic shaping technology, service providers can now implement high-performance H-QoS for even the most demanding applications. By using network interface devices (NIDs) to perform these traffic conditioning functions at the demarcation point,
providers can most effectively take control their services from edge-to-edge, even over multi-vendor, multi-carrier and multi-technology converged networks, without reconfiguring, upgrading or replacing existing access platforms.
Previous issues of Creanord EchoNEWS
Creanord EchoNEWS September 2009
Creanord EchoNEWS August 2009
Creanord EchoNEWS July 2009
Creanord EchoNEWS June 2009
Creanord EchoNEWS April - May 2009
Creanord EchoNEWS March 2009
Creanord EchoNEWS February 2009
Creanord EchoNEWS January 2009
Creanord EchoNEWS December 2008
Creanord EchoNEWS November 2008
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