Overview

General information

Application Assurance (AA) is a service-enabling technology that enhances QoS functions by providing additional traffic control, traffic diversion, application identification, statistics collection, and data reporting.

AA and dynamic subscriber policy control allow a broadband network to provide application-based subscriber management for Internet access.

The fundamental elements of AA processing are:

• identification of the traffic on a per-flow or per-session basis

• policy-based treatment of the identified traffic

Shallow packet inspection (SPI), inspects Layer 1 to Layer 3 traffic information and does not provide application-based QoS information. AA enables deep packet inspection (DPI) of subscriber traffic using policies that define the action to perform for specific traffic types on a per-subscriber basis.

Subscriber traffic is selected for processing by AA, then inspected by an ISA-AA MDA or ESA VM in a logical group. See ISA-AA groups and partitions for more information about ISA-AA groups and partitions.

Note: AA policies can be configured on an NE only when an ISA-AA group exists on the NE.

The benefits of AA for residential and business service providers are:

• enhanced application-level QoS using policy-based traffic management

• traffic flow thresholds and threshold-crossing notifications

• application-aware reporting and performance analysis

• greater network security

• high scalability and flexibility to control network costs

The NFM-P supports AA functions on the 7450 ESS and 7750 SR.

Note: AA is not supported on a single-slot chassis.