Protocol Support

Peer-to-peer is the single most bandwidth-consuming application in many parts of today‘s Internet. It not only incurs rising communication costs, but also adversely affects the performance of important network applications such as Internet telephony, Web, e-mail and file transfer. The high volume and the often questionable nature of the exchanged content make P2P a good target for traffic shaping. Assigning P2P a lower priority and defining data rate limits increase the performance of mission-critical applications particularly during periods of high utilization.

Instant messaging are popular with many network users. Their uncontrolled use poses severe security threats. The dangerous botnets are based on hijacked IM programs and used to distribute worms and viruses and to mount large-scale DDoS attacks. Particularly in corporate environments it is usually favorable to block such IM activities and only allow sanctioned IM clients. This can be achieved with simple IM filtering rules.

Voice over IP (VoIP) / Skype has become one of the most-widely used Internet applications. The VoIP detection allows companies to gain insight in and control over their employees‘ VoIP usage. It enables Internet service providers to offer differentiated services and to optimize the VoIP usage in their networks. VoIP applications are most severely affected by overloaded networks. This effect can be alleviated by prioritization and bandwidth guarantees using the PRX Traffic Manager. Even non-standard protocols such as Skype are supported.

Standard means the support of the most popular legacy protocols for Web, email and file transfer as well as direct download links (DDL). The term DDL refers to a service offered by so-called one-click file hosters such as RapidShare.com and MegaUpload.com. The traffic generated by DDL services is rapidly rising and begins to rival the data volume generated by P2P-based file sharing.

Streaming includes media streaming protocols and applications used by Internet radio, TV stations and many Web pages. Prominent examples are Joost and YouTube. Joost uses a protocol similar to Skype to distribute TV-like programs using P2P technology. YouTube facilitates Adobe Flash to offer video streaming embedded in its Web site. Flash is also used by many online advertisements. All these services have become very popular and are responsible for a significant data volume in the network.

That includes the support of the most important tunnel protocols and applications such as OpenVPN and IPSec. Tunnel protocols are widely used to securely transfer data over the public Internet. Depending on the tunneled application, a tunnel may potentially consume a large amount of bandwidth. While it is virtually impossible to break encryption and analyze the traffic inside the tunnel, the tunnel itself can be detected and managed. Various different scenarios are possible. For example, tunnel traffic can be restricted to dedicated tunnel endpoints within a company to control the transfer of confidential data, or a certain amount of bandwidth may be guaranteed for business-critical VPN traffic.

Gaming support includes the most popular gaming protocols and applications. While gaming protocols generally don‘t consume much bandwidth, latency is important to guarantee a smooth gaming experience when playing ego shooters like Halflife 2 or action strategy games like the famous World of Warcraft. The ipoque PRX Traffic Manager helps to keep latency low by allocating a certain amount of bandwidth for gaming. This is especially interesting for special gaming tariffs where users pay for a better gaming experience. The PRX Traffic Manager can also be used to block online gaming in schools or universities, for example.

The support of business protocols includes the most critical protocols used for daily business in corporate environments. With simple prioritization management the performance of business critical applications like SAP can be noticeably increased.