This this going to change ISP billing all together? >Tools coming for probing, billing of IP packets
ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING TIMES: Redwood City, Calif.
- Spurred by Internet service providers
(ISPs), networking vendors are introducing
tools to monitor and meter traffic across
wide-area-network Internet links. The
technology is being keenly sought, now that
ISPs are saying that usage-based billing for
customers is all but inevitable.
Existing players, such as Xacct Technologies
Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), are extending the
Internet Protocol packet-billing tools they
rolled out earlier this year for use by less
traditional service providers. At the recent
Western Show for cable TV multisystem
operators (MSOs), Xacct announced a deal
with CableData Inc. to extend IP packet
billing to MSO service providers.
Separately, Web newcomer Narus Inc.,
based here, unveiled a distributed probe and
database system that makes it possible to
fully analyze and categorize IP flows at
semantic levels. The result is a seven-layer
traffic ana-lysis that allows ISPs to bill
appropriately for newer, value-added
services such as IP telephony and
videoconferencing. Ori Cohen, founder and
chief executive of Narus, said that only a full
application-based analysis of traffic will allow
ISPs to fairly charge premium rates for
differentiated services.
"This means going up a layer from RMON
[remote monitoring]," said Cohen. "We need
to perform true session reconstruction in
real-time, looking beyond the packet header
to assemble information about the IP session
itself."
Intranet apps
Meanwhile, sever-centric vendors in intranet
applications are attempting to apply similar
rules of monitoring and flow control to handle
Web server traffic. Alteon Networks Inc.
(San Jose, Calif.) has upgraded a software
package for bandwidth control, and 3Com
Corp. is offering a new multiport server card
to handle Fast Ethernet packet traffic.
Narus touts its system as complementary to
both RMON and Cisco Systems Inc.'s NetFlow
method of classifying IP traffic. The Narus
system requires dedicated hardware
platforms within the network called "semantic
traffic analyzers, " but Cohen emphasized
that the probes are passive, and do not add
any latencies to a network. The first such
P2000 traffic probes will be introduced in the
first quarter. Initial releases will support Fast
Ethernet ports, with OC-3 (155-Mbit) and
OC-12 (622-Mbit) ports slated before the
end of 1999. For faster backbone ports, a
multiple-CPU probe may be required.
The probes log the type of protocol used in
the packet flow, such as H.323 or FTP, as
well as the application category of the
protocol and the end user's pattern of use.
The analyzer probes send the information to
distributed middleware residing on one or
more servers, with inherent fault-tolerance
features. The middleware performs initial
correlation and aggregation of data, and
sends the information to an Oracle-based
relational database.
Narus is hoping to line up partners for both
hardware probes and specialized software
packages for information filtering. The
company will publish a list of open application
programming interfaces, and will talk to
potential partners at upcoming conferences
like ComNet and Internet World. Cohen said
that service providers recognize the
necessity of moving beyond flat-rate billing
for Internet accounts in 1999, and that the
only remaining issues are the granularity of
value-added services to be addressed in
usage-based billing.
Software startups involved purely in billing
mediation are expanding their efforts this
month. Xacct, which launched a Mediation
Engine at October's ISPcon show, has just
signed a deal with CableData (Rancho
Cordova, Calif.) integrating the Xacct Detail
Records, or XDR, with CableData's
Intelecable System. That system is a unified
relational database that manages
transactions for cable-TV networks that
supply value-added data and IP telephony
services to cable customers.
Track and bill
Lanse Leach, chief technology officer of
CableData, said that Xacct's tools already
have been ported to a Cisco environment
using the CableData management system,
allowing the tracking and billing of IP
telephony voice calls over a standard cable
MSO billing system. The package can be
extended to video-on-demand billing or
two-way broadband service such as file
transfers. Eventu-ally, CableData and Xacct
expect to offer packages to MSOs that
would allow customers to provision their own
new services from a Web site, and have
those services added to a billing system in
near real-time.
Xacct has been promoting XDR to traditional
ISPs and competitive local-exchange carriers
since last summer (see Oct. 19, page 65).
The expansion to the CableData Intelecable
environment reflects the number of cable
MSOs that want to offer Internet access and
telephony services in 1999, but lack the
billing schemes they need for IP packets.
Xacct's Mediation Engine is based on Java
with C++ extensions. It can monitor all
aspects of the network from physical layer to
application layer, spanning the seven layers
of the Open Systems Interconnect protocol
stack. The software runs on Solaris now,
with Windows NT planned for 1999. It can be
bundled with most standard database
engines.
Limor Schweitzer, chief technology officer at
Xacct, wants to move a step further in
standardized IP billing and monitoring,
through a proposal the company will make to
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
this month. For ISPs to talk a universal
language of IP quality of service, there must
be a standard "currency" of performance.
Schweitzer is promoting a 3-D "chunk" for IP
packets defining a standard time slice,
bandwidth parameter and latency figure. This
will allow ISPs to peer with each other, and
with other carriers and end users, to
guarantee certain currency figures over a
network and offer refunds if QoS parameters
are not met.
Policy-based approach
Last week, another startup, Ukiah Software
Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.), debuted policy-based
QoS management. NetRoad Active Policy
System will compete with policy-server QoS
systems from existing players such as IP
Highway Inc. (Fort Lee, N.J.).
Gordon Smith, vice president of marketing,
claimed that Ukiah can service both
monitoring and management ends of adding
QoS to enterprise and carrier networks. The
NetRoad Active Policy System allows network
managers and carriers to directly implement
QoS through policy initiatives carried out at
the application layer. The software uses the
Common Open Policy Service (Cops) protocol
promoted by policy-server specialists such as
IP Highway and Orchestream. But Smith
emphasized that Ukiah doesn't expect the
world to be Cops-compliant
immediately-instead, the Active Policy
System software can work with existing
SNMP and RMON protocols, as well as
command-line interfaces. It can use a
variety of control mechanisms, including IP
Precedence, RSVP and the upcoming
Differentiated Services suite from the IETF.
The real advantage in using both the
TrafficWare and Active Policy System suites
in concert, Smith said, is that bandwidth
management can become a self-regulating,
auto- mated process.
Policies enacted through a directory protocol
like LDAP, or through Corba methodologies,
can establish reporting and alarm systems
that lead the network to correct itself,
minimizing interventions by network
managers.
Copyright c 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
