Enabling Differentiated Classes of Services at High Performance

By David Le Goff – 6WIND Product Marketing Manager

Quality of Service (QoS) is a basic foundation for enabling the “network monetization” that represents such a critical challenge for both service providers and carriers.

Within networking equipment, the first, critical step in the QoS process involves the identification of multiple traffic classes, typically known as traffic classification (and a future post will explain how 6WIND’s software accelerates this function).

Once the identification of each of the traffic flows is complete, the main challenge for the  QoS process is the need to sustain high performance through the networking subsystem, typically involving  tens of millions of flows and a net throughput that reaches hundreds of millions packet per second.

Typically, the gateways from a Wide Area Network (WAN) to a Local Area Network (LAN) experience congestion issues. In such cases, queuing techniques must be implemented at this edge.

6WINDGate™ Support for High-Performance QoS

The 6WINDGate packet processing software includes a QoS module, the performance of which is maximized by running in the fast path. This module enables equipment providers to address these QoS performance challenges while optimizing their cost-performance of their solutions.

The 6WINDGate QoS module provides both software and hardware traffic shaping capabilities:

• Support for on-chip accelerators for ingress and egress QoS algorithms and policing (WRED and Taildrop, both with three different thresholds).
• Algorithms for traffic conditioning with token bucket and (two rates) three-color marker (TRTCM).

Thanks to these features, OEMs are able to leverage 6WINDGate to deliver high-performance QoS in networking systems such as GGSN, PDN-GW, PCEF and next generation Firewall (ngFW).

In turn, service providers using such systems are able to provide differentiated class of services to their subscribers, tailored to specific end-user requirements (and revenue opportunities).

As an example, such systems may enable a user to run a P2P application under a monthly service plan that provides 1GByte of traffic as the basic subscription. Then if the limit is reached, the service provider is able to limit the user’s bit-rate down to 200Kbps until the end of the monthly billing cycle.