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Cisco Quantum Policy Suite: Efficiently Optimize and Monetize Data Services

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What You Will Learn

With the dramatic growth of mobile data traffic, mobile operators need a dependable policy, charging and services control infrastructure to manage this traffic while increasing service revenues. An intelligent policy control solution helps assure the proper allocation of network resources based on what subscribers have purchased and what the network can deliver. The solution also supports the rapid and efficient deployment, management, and monetization of basic and advanced service offerings, such as service tiers, personal price plans, prepayments and a growing array of app-based services.
Cisco has built the Cisco® Quantum Policy Suite, a 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP) compliant solution, to address operator requirements for intelligent and highly scalable policy and charging control. This fully virtualized, vendor-independent solution is available on the Cisco ASR 5000 Series multimedia core platform, the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) B-Series Blade Servers, and other server platforms. It provides a range of features and three important attributes that are crucial for policy control solutions today: high scalability and reliability, multi-access flexibility, and service velocity.

Challenge

Recent metrics on the growth of mobile traffic reconfirm its dramatic upward trend. The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast predicts mobile data traffic volume will grow 18-fold from 2011 to 2016. There will be more than 19 billion mobile-connected devices in 2016, up from 10 billion in 2011. Globally, the average mobile connection will generate 1,216 megabytes of mobile data traffic per month in 2016, up from 92 megabytes in 2011.
The ability to scale policy and charging is vital, as major mobile operators must often support 100 million simultaneous sessions. Another important requirement for a policy and charging solution is that it works efficiently with network architectures that support multimedia applications using voice and video, which are particularly sensitive to network latency. Finally, mobile operators need intelligent and flexible policy control features that can be used to create various new mobile subscription plans based on different usage requirements and that can detect users accessing the mobile network from different geographical entry points using different types of devices.
All of these evolving industry requirements prompted the 3GPP to define a policy control and charging standard for Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) call establishment. The Cisco Quantum Policy Suite solution addresses all 3GPP PCC standards in a cost-effective solution.

Solution

The Cisco Quantum Policy Suite is a comprehensive policy, charging, and subscriber data management solution that allows service providers to control and monetize their networks and to profit from personalized services. The Cisco Quantum Policy Suite has the following components:

• Quantum Policy Server (PS)

• Quantum Charging Server (CS)

• Quantum Application Gateway (AGW)

• Quantum Unified Subscriber Manager (USuM)

• Quantum Subscriber Analytics

The Cisco Quantum Policy Suite provides an intelligent control plane solution, including southbound interfaces to various policy control enforcement functions (PCEFs) in the network, and northbound interfaces to OSS/BSS and subscriber applications, IMSs, and web applications. The Cisco Quantum Policy Suite modules are enabled individually or deployed as an integrated end-to-end policy, charging, and service creation solution.
Specific components of the Cisco solution include the following.

• Quantum Policy Server implements the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF), which provides real-time management of subscribers, applications, and network resources based on service-provider-configured business rules. The Quantum Policy Server controls and coordinates the subscriber's session across multiple enforcement points in the network, such as gateways, deep packet inspection (DPI) devices, and optimization servers. Policy decisions and enforcement actions include subscriber session authorization, service selection and personalization, quality of service (QoS) and bandwidth control, session- and application-specific quota authorization and tracking, as well as application-based admission control.

• Quantum Charging Server supports both online (OCS) and offline (OFCS) charging services with real-time rating rules. The Quantum Charging Server offers an easily deployed prepaid OCS solution including integration with external intelligent network (IN) systems. One-time, recurring, rollover, and top-up balances are supported, against which both default and user-personalized thresholds (for example, low-balance notifications) may be defined. Quotas may be shared across group accounts, such as family, corporate, or multiple-devices plans. For offline charging, the Quantum Charging Server supports flexible Charging Detail Record (CDR) generation. Rules-based filters can be applied to CDR streams, for example, to strip out nonbilling-related fields or to augment records with data from other sources.

• Quantum Application Gateway extends policy control to the web, allowing web-based, non-IMS applications to take full advantage of the policy framework (for example, to request QoS to sponsor data access or to offer cloud-based services). Applications can be quickly integrated with policy using SOAP/REST-based web services and at reduced costs without the need to support the Rx interface. Deployed at the network edge, the Quantum Application Gateway supports secure access from applications and handsets. Service providers can control which third-party over-the-top (OTT) partners can request policy services through mutual authentication and access control lists.

• Quantum Unified Subscriber Manager is a centralized, highly scalable subscriber data management solution for real-time subscriber policy and charging control. This unique subscriber profile repository (SPR) provides a comprehensive data storage engine coupled with a virtualized bridge to federate existing subscriber databases into a unified access layer. Quantum Unified Subscriber Manager services the Quantum application layer, including Policy Server, Charging Server, and Application Gateway. It can be used as a standalone Subscriber Data Management (SDM) solution, but also smoothly integrates with Cisco Quantum Policy Suite components as well as with other systems.

• Quantum Subscriber Analytics captures essential subscriber event and transaction data that cannot be fulfilled in either the back-office or transport layers. Operators can examine subscriber behavior and usage by time of day, location, network access type, application, session duration, and subscriber events. The Quantum Subscriber Analytics reporting dashboard provides comprehensive graphical reports for both impromptu and scheduled reporting.

A Platform Approach to Policy and Charging Control

As a fully virtualized solution, the Quantum Core Platform underlies Cisco Quantum Policy Suite and is shared across all Cisco Quantum Policy Suite components. The cornerstone of Cisco's platform approach is a high-performance core rules engine that delivers unsurpassed performance. Quantum's feature plug-ins are a set of componentized feature modules. The core rules engine binds different feature plug-ins using policy blueprints to support use cases that are bundled into product modules. Tying the Cisco Quantum Policy Suite components and features together is the Quantum Policy Builder, through which new services and policy business rules are defined.

Competitive Benefits

The new Cisco Quantum Policy Suite solution provides these benefits over competitive solutions.

• The Cisco Quantum Policy Suite architecture allows simultaneous sessions and transactions per second (TPS) capacity to be independently scaled. This allows Cisco Quantum Policy Suite to be efficiently sized for both high simultaneous sessions with low TPS or low sessions with high TPS, resulting in lower total cost of ownership when compared to traditional PCRF models. Session scalability in traditional PCRFs is typically limited by the supported TPS and the reverse. As soon as sessions are bound to a given processing node, the ability to handle traffic spikes is reduced.

• The Cisco Quantum Policy Suite's virtual architecture supports flexible and cost-effective carrier grade strategies. Virtual instances are spread across multiple blade servers for full hardware and software redundancy within a Cisco Quantum Policy Suite cluster.

– N+1 load sharing redundancy is provided for the Policy Director layer and Quantum Server transactional load.

– 1+1 data replication is provided for Session Manager and Quantum Unified Subscriber Manager data.

– 1+1 redundancy is provided for the Quantum Control Center and Reporting Servers.

Health checks monitor Cisco Quantum Policy Suite virtual instances and processes. If a fault is detected, processes are restarted in place. Should a blade server fail, incoming requests are directed to available virtual instances on other blade servers. This helps to ensure high availability and fault tolerance against software faults as well as hardware failures.

• The flexible nature of the Cisco Quantum Policy Suite lets a service provider go beyond standard policy definition to add new, customized functionality. The Cisco Quantum Policy Suite provides a comprehensive open policy software development kit (SDK) using industry-standard languages and frameworks. Customized or vendor scripting is not needed, which allows service providers to create plug-ins within the existing policy server and automatically exposes the new services to the policy engine.

Why Cisco?

Cisco has extensive deployment experience with policy and charging control applications among mobile operators around the world. The Cisco Quantum Policy Suite solution provides unparalleled scalability, the single most crucial feature required in policy and charging control solutions today. It encompasses a comprehensive set of capabilities on a fully virtualized, network-independent platform.
Cisco Quantum Policy Suite provides mobile operators with a solution that has among the lowest total cost of ownership on the market and is among the highest in performance and scalability. Cisco's comprehensive, end-to-end, intelligent mobile Internet architecture and solutions provide mobile operators with a range of features that allow them to enhance the existing customer experience, assure premium multimedia services, create new business-to-business and business-to-consumer service models with partners, and rapidly develop and launch innovative new services.

Cisco Services

• Cisco's end-to-end Mobile Internet solutions allow service providers provide high-quality video experiences through their mobile networks, and to monetize and optimize their networks.

• Cisco Services provide technical expertise (including expertise on third-party equipment) across all phases of the network lifecycle, from design, testing, and implementation to network operations.

• Cisco Services are proven to rapidly deliver Mobile Internet solutions, resulting in high-quality voice, data, and video for a powerful customer experience and faster realization of increased revenue and market share.

• Cisco-Services-led deployment accelerates time-to-market and mitigates operational risks with service-level agreements (SLAs).

• Service providers benefit from our cumulative experience across many Mobile Internet solution deployments worldwide.

For More Information

For information on Cisco Policy and Charging Control, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/mobile.