vDish – Differentiated Service Handling

It’s been a while since we posted a more technical blog with some updates on things we are working on, so there is quite a lot we can talk about. Our Service Orchestration platform is growing in breadth and depth, and we are continually adding new services that Operators can now deploy on their networks.

One of the recent additions is a service we call vDish – Differentiated Service Handling. vDish lets us give Operators a way of attaching different Quality of Service parameters to specific applications. In its first instantiation, we are using vDish to map particular games and other latency-sensitive apps to what is called Low Latency DOCSIS (LLD) Service Flows.

The issue we are addressing here is a very hot one in the industry. Many on-line games require low-latency in order to work well (i.e. if I push a key to shoot at something, I need to it happen quickly, not after a second, otherwise I will miss my target). DOCSIS 3.1-based cable networks support a feature called LLD in order to reduce this latency and it is a crucial item in improving the end-user experience on the Internet. The trouble is, for various reasons, LLD is not well supported by the docsis gateways, which is where apps need to be recognized and directed to the LLD flows. A full explanation will be too long here, but in short, most app classification is done by rules driven by the CMTS and done after the NAT function, meaning that important information about the app is lost.

Inango offers a complete solution – combining the ability to classify apps on the LAN-side of the NAT function, map to capabilities supported by the underlying hardware forwarding engine and fully integrate with the acceleration engines so that performance is maximized.

And for vDish, LLD is only the first step. We see this as an initial stage in an implementation of a more generic per-app QoS handler that will work on any WAN media. But we’ll leave that part of the story for another day.

If you are interested in seeing how vDish can be used to transform the user-experience on your network, please contact us  and we’ll be happy to arrange a presentation and/or demo.