December 21, 2016 – IoT, Smart Grid, Smart Cities and Collaboration, as many other fields of application, needs fruitful harmonization between network and service.
The adoption of new Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solutions (mainly based on video) is crucial for the business development and the strategy success of enterprises widely spread on geographies.
Multiple UC&C applications often share the same network resources and are unaware of traffic generated by other services in terms of effective bandwidth usage.
Moreover, the traditional technologies managing Quality of Service (QoS), traffic prioritization and UC&C Call Admission Control (CAC) policies are no longer adequate for delivering an optimized Quality of Experience (QoE).
The introduction of a Software Defined Networking approach allows a more flexible enterprise network management improving bandwidth efficiency also for UC&C applications. QoE challenges can be addressed following a fully converged strategy, taking into account at the same time network status and applications needs. Understanding UC&C services bandwidth needs and determining the right allocation of network resources are key factors in order to:
provide the users with the best possible QoE
provide a smart usage of higher-priority Classes of Services
ensure that the bandwidth used by multiple UC&C applications does not exceed the Service Provider’s Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Dynamic Admission Control is the first solution that takes advantages the potentials of a powerful SDN application – Netwrapper – that “wraps” network and service applications.
Bridging the gap between applications needs and network resources availability, Netwrapper enables a dynamic tuning of CAC rules and application prioritization.
The first release of Netwrapper connects the IP network (via Cisco APIC-EM controller) on one side, and the UC&C applications on the other side (Cisco Unified Call Manager and Microsoft Skype for Business) at Enterprise level.