6WINDGate and DPI

Introduction

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology is widely used in many applications including security (virus, spam or intrusion detection), content inspection to identify flows relating to a dedicated application and extraction of network statistics.

DPI is also deployed within next-generation telecom network infrastructure,where it forms a critical component of several subsystems. One example is the Policy and Charging Enforcement Function (PCEF), which identifies and associates applications and/or users with specific traffic flows before applying policies to individual sessions.

DPI is also used is Video Media Gateways which compress video streams to optimize network bandwidth within the LTE core network.

For both these applications, the DPI technology must deliver wire-speed performance in networks where data capacity is exploding, despite increasingly complex challenges in packet inspection, classification and steering.

Compared to a standard network or telecom equipment system that only inspects the very first headers of a packet (layers 2 to 4), DPI performs more detailed analysis of the packet to identify application-level flows and content. To perform complex packet analysis (data extraction, flow correlation or application-level protocol decoding etc.) for high performance networks, DPI requires huge amounts of processing.

As network performance increases, it becomes impossible to perform a layer 2 to 4 analysis of the packet and DPI with a single processor. Packet processing is now required to offload the DPI application. In larger configurations (for instance in bladed systems), packet processing can also be used to load balance traffic to several processors, each of which is performing DPI.

The new generations of DPI equipment require a close integration of network-oriented packet processing and DPI functions. The process of migrating DPI applications to high- performance platforms must be simplified in order to maximize the reuse of existing software.

6WINDGate Benefits

Multicore technology is an ideal platform for implementing network-oriented packet processing. It provides the needed processing capabilities and integrates network interfaces and built-in security hardware accelerators (crypto and regex engines).

6WINDGate is the only packet processing software product that gives OEMs the power to develop the most cost-effective DPI systems with the highest networking performance while minimizing time-to-revenue.