User Experience in High-Speed Networks

With continued growth in IP traffic forecast – set to reach the milestone of one zettabyte according to Cisco’s annual Visual Networking Index – it’s worth considering how the mix of that traffic will reflect user application consumption.

In the consumer world, the traffic will include data from a range of sources – including gaming, video, VoIP and so on. But the strongest growth will come from internet video and online gaming. These are applications that demand high-performance, as users increasingly shift to a real-time experience. A multi-player game needs optimal performance in terms of latency, round-trip delays – if it doesn’t meet minimum performance standards, then it ceases to be a viable proposition.

The network operators who carry the traffic for such games and video content have a responsibility to ensure their networks can meet user expectations. This isn’t easy – they need to be constantly alert to ensure that traffic flows smoothly and that bottlenecks and congestion is rapidly alleviated.

This requires constant monitoring and sampling of traffic from across their entire network. To achieve this, they have to deploy solutions that can collect, sample and filter traffic. High-performance monitoring systems must be deployed in order to ensure that users obtain the quality of service that they expect.

With faster and faster network infrastructure being deployed – moving from 10Gb/s to 40Gb/s and, soon, up to 100Gb/s in the core – this demands solutions that can cope with monitoring data at these rates. Hardware acceleration provides a convenient, scalable solution to this problem, ensuring that the control systems can cope with the rapid growth in data traffic.

By using hardware acceleration solutions for packet filtering, network operators can confidently ensure that user expectations are met and that potential problems are identified and eliminated before network degradation occurs.