Acme To Deliver End to End IP Control

Acme Packet today unveiled its Net-Net products, which sit at the edge of IP networks to give service providers end to end control of traffic through a technology called Session Aware Networking.

“Interactive communications is high margin,” notes Jim Hourihan, Acme’s vice president of marketing and product management. “Across and between IP networks you deal with a lot of boundary issues. But these things need to work end to end. You don’t want to have to worry about what network you’re on.”

Layer 3 intelligence, he says. The first problem that addresses is the session mission control and routing problem, he says. It allows the carrier to select QoS for individual traffic types, such as video for example. That new level of intelligence also enables service providers to choose the best path through a network for a particular application, he says. “The best path through the network is not necessarily the least hops that BGCP selects. It could be a longer router with better quality,” says Hourihan. “That can happen at Layer 5. But you also have Layer 3 flows. While you can select best route at Layer 5, you have to get Layer 3 traffic to take the same route.”

That includes information to allow for SLA and security assurance, assurance, revenue profit protection (through bandwidth policing) and CALEA compliance, he says. But in today’s IP networks, the service provider can’t always trust the end point to provide it with information on traffic SLA requirements, for example, he says. So Acme’s technology controls QoS markings as they come onto the network.

The initial products being released from the Acme Packet Net-Net family include the Session Router, a Layer 5, SIP-based router with routing based on quality; the Media Manager, a Layer 3 device that performs all the heavy packet filtering to control RTP streams and handles security, QoS marking and CALEA-related functions; and Session Director, which combines the functionality of those two products in a single box.

Betas of the products are expected to start next month, with general availability of the products slated for the third quarter.

These products could be used for trunking applications between PSTN and IP networks or between IP and other IP networks, as two examples, says Hourihan. “We do call routing based upon cost,” he says. “Our Session Router does signaling, collects for this call from A to B. Our Media Manager then looks at quality and looks at how good quality is per segment on that link – so if we had another call requesting service from the same city code in Europe, we could reroute all calls destined to that city code network because the quality is better there. If you exceed the set policy, the Media Manager rejects calls rather than driving down performance of all calls on the link. It can also offload routing from the softswitch.”

The alternative to the Acme products, notes Hourihan, would be using gateways on the border. But that kind of solution would require much more equipment, which means higher real estate, cooling and management costs, he says. “If you want to provide solution for SIP-based packet peering with 100,000 simultaneous calls, Sonus would require seven quad processor Sun Netra boxes for routing. We do it in one session router only 1U high. Sonus requires 12 GSX 9000s; we require three Media Managers.”

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