Caspian Solution Gives Legacy Core Routers New Life

There’s no doubt carriers want to put core routers to use performing the complex functionalities once deemed the exclusive purview of multiservice edge routers, notes Caspian Networks Inc.’s Junaid Islam, vice president for technical strategies.

Caspian gained this insight when it found its core router was being deployed alongside legacy core routers to exploit Caspian’s flow state technology, which recognizes and forwards streams of related IP packets together as flows. The upshot of this phenomenon is Caspian now has repositioned itself as a supplier of a media controller for the core that can turn legacy routers into powerful engines for delivering highly differentiated services, even without MPLS, Islam says.

While conventional routers perform routing table lookups and forward every packet they encounter individually, Caspian’s system performs one lookup for the first packet of any new flow it doesn’t recognize and switches all subsequent packets of that flow in accord with the relevant QoS parameters, Islam explains. All this is accomplished through hardware processing that analyzes the packet characteristics without performing lookup across five dimensions, allowing the system to identify uniquely each flow and establish a record of the state information, which expires once the flow is terminated.

“The technology gives you visibility into the pipe so that you can set and enforce policies no matter what the application is,” Islam says. “You can control delays between packets in an IP video conference, regulate bandwidth for multimedia and whatever else you want to do to monetize the applications at the core.”

This has important implications for the effort of content providers and service providers to develop new business models for Web-based media, he adds. “Everybody is looking at online media as a business for themselves,” he notes. “Now you can go to the guy who produces movies and offer him a way to ensure faster delivery at higher levels of quality based on whatever type of business arrangement makes sense.”

Leveraging such capabilities from the core could give some service providers advantages over others in cutting with media suppliers who are looking for better IP distribution of their content but want to avoid establishing separate arrangements with every local service provider. Not only big carriers but big cable companies are exploring these possibilities, Islam says.

For more on how core router sales are driving product technology advances, read "Core Routers Remain Central Players in Carrier Networks."

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