Application-Oriented Networking for Smarter Networks

Application-oriented networking is designed to optimize network performance for specific applications, such as video streaming or online gaming. This approach can improve network efficiency by up to 30%.

By understanding the unique requirements of each application, network administrators can tailor their network architecture to meet those needs. This can include prioritizing traffic, allocating bandwidth, and implementing quality of service (QoS) policies.

For example, a network designed for online gaming might prioritize packets related to game traffic, ensuring a smooth and responsive experience for players.

Application-oriented networking offers numerous advantages, including lower bandwidth costs due to more efficient traffic balancing among diverse circuits. This leads to increased application performance without the need for bandwidth upgrades.

One of the key benefits is simplified IT management and monitoring, achieved through the automation of dynamic traffic steering. This makes it easier to manage and monitor network traffic.

Application-oriented networking also ensures application reliability and consistency by dynamically routing traffic among multiple circuits to meet application experience parameters. This is particularly important for latency-sensitive applications like voice and video.

Versa's application-aware routing identifies, classifies, and secures traffic based on the application ID, leveraging a database of over 3,600 application signatures and 100 million URLs. This approach combines application session flow analysis with SLA definitions for dynamic routing-oriented steering policies.

Here are some of the key features of application-oriented networking:

By using application-oriented networking, you can set up application-intelligent VPNs and connectivity with minimal configuration. This allows for the cost-effective and quick deployment of site-to-site full-mesh VPN topologies, which support redundancy for latency-sensitive applications.

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Application-oriented networking offers a range of benefits, but two key areas to consider are security and performance.

Security is simplified with Application-defined networks (ADNs), which establish discrete independent networks that don't require complex security rules to partition traffic types. This reduces the risk of human error in maintaining complex access control lists (ACLs) across many sites.

ADNs eliminate the risk of a breach in one network bleeding into others, such as a payment network. They also include standard security features like firewalls, intrusion detection, logging, wireless scanning, content filtering, access control lists, multi-factor authentication, and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption.

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ADNs also offer the flexibility to deploy additional custom security features, such as HTTPS filtering, security information and event management (SIEM), or any best-of-breed security application hosted on virtual servers within the cloud.

Versa's Secure Cloud IP Architecture takes security a step further with its application-aware routing, which includes multiprotocol BGP advertisements and a Deep packet inspection (DPI) engine that identifies applications through protocol parsers and monitors transport layer security handshakes.

This level of application awareness enables enforceable policies to be applied based on application experience, creating a business-intelligent WAN.

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At the core of DFA's functionality is its architecture and workflow. This high-level structure relies on two key components: DNS-Netflow Correlation and CDN-APP Classification.

These components work in tandem to provide a comprehensive view of network traffic. The correlation process involves live DNS records and Netflow records, which are captured at network ingress interfaces.

Here's a step-by-step breakdown of the DNS-Netflow Correlation process:

This process continues until a pre-defined loop limit is reached or no further domain names are found. The resulting data is then correlated with BGP to gain more knowledge about the traffic paths.

CDN-APP Classification is the final output, which extends the traffic flows with CDN domain and OTT-Application information. This includes using a URL-APP database to associate a specific domain name or URL to the OTT-Application it belongs to.

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Routing decisions in application-oriented networking are made at layer 7 of the OSI stack, examining the content of the message to make informed decisions.

This is a significant improvement over traditional routing methods, which often rely on layer 4 decisions based on TCP/IP addresses and port numbers.

Application-oriented networks can examine the content of the message to make routing decisions based on various criteria, such as the value of a purchase order or the ship date.

This allows for more precise control over traffic flow and better support for latency-sensitive applications like voice and video.

Here are some examples of how application-oriented networks can make routing decisions:

The use of application-oriented networks can also simplify IT management and monitoring by automating dynamic traffic steering, reducing bandwidth costs, and increasing application performance.