How to Use A10’s Intelligent Traffic Steering Solution

Transcription

In this video we look at deploying A10’s Intelligent Traffic Steering solution in a mobile service provider environment to enhance network utilization by steering traffic flows to value-added services in a way that is transparent to the end user. Intelligently steering traffic can enable operators to offer personalized services to drive new revenue streams and improve operational efficiency for significant cost savings.

AI Transcript:

Hello, everyone. In today’s video. We will look at A10’s intelligent traffic steering solution. In a typical telco environment, you have your users connecting to video towers and then going via the packet core to the internet.

The packet core for example in the case of an LTE network would be your EPC and in case of 5G, it would be or 5G core. In between the telecom providers like to offer value added services such as data optimization, parental control, and in some cases they still offer caching service.  To steer the traffic through these value-added services, they need a device.

Typically, this device has been an application delivery controller, an ADC.

So what happens is that the traditional providers have typically used IP addresses to steer all the traffic through the value-added services and then it goes out to the internet.

However, there’s a shortcoming with this approach and the problem is that as the volume of traffic has increased, these devices or services are no longer able to cope up with that volume of traffic.

Now, for example let’s look at the data optimization service. Correctly, the service provider sends all the traffic through the data optimization service based on the IP address. However, the data optimization service may or may not be applicable, depending on the type of the traffic.

For example, it will not be applicable for HTTPS traffic, the SSL traffic. So, you do not want to necessarily send your traffic to data optimization service to overload, the server unnecessarily.

Additionally, they may be different type of users. For example, prepaid versus postpaid or the type of tower to which they’re connecting. For example, the rat type. So what you really want to do is you want to look at the user attributes as well as the policy profile for the users to selectively steer the traffic through one or more of these value-added Services.

However, that’s not what is happening today. As a result, these services are overloaded and are reaching their limit. So, right now there are two options for the service providers.

One is that either they do not send the traffic through the value-added services, which means that the investments they have made wont result in any profit.

Alternatively, they could invest and upgrade these devices. However, that would be a very expensive proposition as well.

So what’s the real solution for this? Well, A10 has a good solution called its Intelligent Traffic steering solution to help mitigate this problem.

So, what we can do is, we can look at multiple parameters of the traffic. So for example, we can look at the traffic type.

And this can be for example: HTTP, HTTPS, voice, etc.

So, depending on the type of the traffic, we can determine whether it should really go through one or more of these value-added services or not.

Secondly, we can look at the user attributes such as IMSI, IMEI, Rat type, etc.

So these attributes we can get from a AAA server?

So for example, if the user is connecting to a video type likes, a 3G, we can determine that it should undergo a data optimization service.

But if it is connecting to a different radio access technology type, then we can determine that it’s probably not worth sending it through a data optimization service.

And finally, we can look at the profile of the user server. So, for example, you may have a prepaid versus postpaid user or you may be associating a profile such as bronze, silver, or gold.

So, instead of statically just sending all the traffic, what we can do is we can look at all these attributes: the traffic type, the user attribute, as well as the profile, and then selectively steer the traffic through one or more of these services.

So for example, if the traffic type is HTTP, if the user is connecting to a radio type of let’s say 3G, and if the profile is gold, we can say that this traffic qualifies to undergo a data optimization service.

So, in that case when the traffic comes, he will send it to the data optimization service and then send it out to the internet.

Another thing to note is that we will only selectively route the traffic so that it does not have to go through the services to which the user has not subscribed.

Now suppose another user comes in and he or she has subscribed to parental control and cashing service. In that case, we will send the traffic to the parental control, to the caching service, and then out towards the internet.

So, this can help you to optimize the utilization of these devices and services. The solution can help the traffic problem at Telecom providers to leverage the existing Investments.

If they do need to upgrade, they can do so selectively, only the devices they really need to upgrade as well as it enables them to provide a good, quality experience to the users. This is an overview of our Intelligent Traffic steering solution. Thanks for watching.

Related Resources

• Intelligent Traffic Steering in Mobile Networks (Solution Brief)
• Scalable and Centralized Video Optimization for Service Providers (Solution Brief)