Former ARPANET, Telenet Leader Goes with the Flow

Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts, one of the four men most commonly credited with the creation of the Internet, is taking a second shot at bringing “flow routing” to IP networks. His new company, which is now shipping product, is called Anagran Inc. 

Roberts’ first shot at flow routing was via Caspian, which he launched in 2000. He says he left Caspian a few years later after it became clear the company wasn’t able to generate any serious margin. Caspian closed its doors in late 2006.

But his dream of successfully building and marketing a router that could deliver the QoS required by real-time traffic like video and voice lived on.

So, in 2004, Roberts founded Anagran, funded initially by Advanced Technology Ventures, Arrowpath Venture Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Roberts says Anagran offers a new and improved version of the flow router, which has more features yet costs 10 times less than the Caspian solution and about three times less than similar-capacity routers on the market.

He says the time for the flow router is right given the new, better economics of memory since the year 2000. Flow routers rely heavily on memory because they record all flows.

Starting this month, Anagran’s flow routers are available worldwide at a list price starting at $70,000. The company is doing some direct sales, but expects to rely heavily on to-be-announced resellers/distributors/channels to sell its flow router.

There are three innovations in the FR-1000, according to Anagran. The fast flow routing feature routes initial packets of flows, and switches remaining packets. That saves power, space and cost while improving QoE. A second feature, called intelligent flow discard, which Anagran says is a totally new approach to flow policing, eliminates large delays and packet losses caused by large queues under overload. It works for both file transfers and streaming media. And through behavioral traffic control the flow router observes the rate, duration, packet size and throughput of a flow so it can occasionally adjust the flow’s class, rate, and route to control P2P and any other desired traffic types.

The fast flow routing feature has allowed Anagran to “change the inherent structure of a router,” says Roberts. At 1RU high, the 48gigE-port product is a tenth the size of what most competitors offer, he says. It also requires a whole lot less power, he adds, explaining while the FR-1000 requires only 300Watts, most routers with this capacity need 4000Watts.

“People for years have said if you do [QoS] kind of improvements for voice, video and data, it will cost more,” says Roberts. “But with this, it costs less.” That’s important, he says, because it’s still not clear if end users are willing to pay for higher-quality treatment for latency-sensitive traffic like voice and video.

Although many people in the industry talk about how their products can achieve QoS, Roberts says today service providers still need separate networks for each type of traffic (voice, video and data), otherwise there are performance problems if traffic gets too heavy. Even if VoIP gets prioritized, he says, today’s packet routers can easily get overwhelmed, and slow down, resulting in packets arriving late, which is the same as losing them in the case of a real-time application such as VoIP.

Of course, both service provider and enterprise network operators have tried to compensate for this by greatly over-engineering their networks so they can withstand peak loads, which typically happen for only short periods of a time.

Anagran’s flow router, which sits at the network edge, addresses this network utilization issue as well, allowing network operators to handle five to eight times the amount of traffic they do today with network cores, says Roberts, noting the F-1000 is compatible with existing MPLS-based core networks.

One application for the F-1000 has the flow router sitting on the network side of a DSLAM to manage both the DSLAM and all the traffic to and from the homes it servers. Specifically, the flow router ensures individual households don’t overload their allotted broadband connections. That means if a home has a 4mbps connection, they can use up to 4mbps if it’s available or for a short period of time. But, if that user is blocking others in the area from getting their fair share of bandwidth, the flow router will “control your traffic to the level that is appropriate.”

Of course, this is a pretty big issue. You’ve no doubt heard the statistic that about 5 percent of Internet users take up about 80 percent of the bandwidth, due to their use of bandwidth-intensive P2P applications.

But Anagran’s goal with flow routing is not so much to stop these heavy users, , says Roberts, but rather to mediate it so voice, video and data can work well.

He adds that some network operators today use deep packet inspection (DPI) boxes to police bandwidth usage, but says that’s an expensive solution, which some believe invades subscriber privacy. “We look at the shape and amount of traffic so we can adjust it if needed,” adds Roberts.

The F-1000 also is ideal for controlling traffic loads on Wi-Fi networks carrying voice, says Roberts. Despite all the talk about voice-enabled Wi-Fi and FMC applications involving Wi-Fi, Roberts says Wi-Fi simply does not work well for voice because of the wireless technology’s potential for delay. That’s because users on Wi-Fi networks have to compete for access. To make Wi-Fi optimal for voice, network operators need to control traffic so it doesn’t experience larger than 100msec delays. Roberts says that means slowing down file transfers a bit and perhaps putting a cap on the number of calls the network will accept at one time. As a result, some folks get busy signals if not enough bandwidth is available, he says, but at least those whose calls do go through will have a good experience.

Two other applications for the F-1000 are data centers and secure government networks. For example, Roberts says Anagran is seeing a lot of interest in its product from the government, which wants to send videos to fighting fronts, but that the satellite networks they’re currently using have too much delay for video.

Key Benefits of Flow Routing

• Existing network immediately performs better
  
• Applications deliver real-time performance from anywhere
  
• Much faster downloads and reduced delay
  
• Guaranteed high quality of all streaming data (video, & voice)
  
• Fair delivery of applications at all times
  
• Based on easy to set policies and rules
  
• Based on real-time conditions of the network
  
• 80 percent smaller, 80 percent less power than other Layer 3 routers

Anagran’s Three Basic Inventions

Fast Flow Routing
This routes initial packets of flows, and switches remaining packets. That saves power, space, and cost while improving QoE.

Intelligent Flow Discard
This, which Anagran says is a totally new approach to flow policing, eliminates large delays and packet losses caused by large queues under overload. It works for both file transfers and streaming media.

Behavioral Traffic Control
Observing the rate, duration, packet size and throughput of a flow allows the flow router to occasionally adjust the flow’s class, rate, and route to control P2P and any other desired traffic types.

Dr. Lawrence Roberts

Dr. Lawrence Roberts holds B.S., M.S., and PhD. degrees from MIT. While at MIT in 1965 he created the first computer-to-computer network using a packet link between MIT and SDC.
In 1966, he was named ARPA's chief scientist. Roberts designed and managed the building of the APRANET over the next six years. The first four computers were connected in 1969 and by 1973, 23 computers were connected worldwide.

At that point Roberts turned the development over to Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf and left ARPA to form the first commercial packet network, Telenet.

Telenet, for which Roberts served as CEO from 1973 to 1980, developed and drove adoption of the popular X.25 data protocol. The company was sold to GTE in 1979 and subsequently became the data division of Sprint.

From 1983 to 1993, Roberts was chairman and CEO of NetExpress, an electronics company specializing in packetized fax and ATM equipment. From 1993 to 1998, he was president of ATM Systems, where he designed advanced ATM and Ethernet switches with QoS and Explicit Rate flow control.

In 1999, Roberts began an effort to design the IP router to route flows, not just random packets, to support high QoS. A year later he founded Caspian Networks, which he left a couple years later.
In 2004 Roberts founded Anagran Inc.


Anagran Inc. http://www.packet.cc/

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