Problem Statement and Use Cases of Application-aware Networking (APN)
draft-li-apn-problem-statement-usecases-08

Abstract

Network operators are facing the challenge of providing better network services for users. As the ever-developing 5G and industrial verticals evolve, more and more services that have diverse network requirements such as ultra-low latency and high reliability are emerging, and therefore differentiated service treatment is desired by users. On the other hand, as network technologies such as Hierarchical QoS (H-QoS), SR Policy, and Network Slicing keep evolving, the network has the capability to provide more fine- granularity differentiated services. However, network operators are typically unaware of the applications that are traversing their network infrastructure, which means that not very effective differentiated service treatment can be provided to the traffic flows. As network technologies evolve including deployments of IPv6, SRv6, Segment Routing over MPLS dataplane, the programmability provided by IPv6 and Segment Routing can be augmented by conveying application related information into the network satisfying the fine- granularity requirements. This document analyzes the existing problems caused by lack of service awareness, and outlines various use cases that could benefit from an Application-aware Networking (APN) framework.

Authors

Zhenbin Li
Shuping Peng
Daniel Voyer
Chongfeng Xie
Peng Liu
Zhuangzhuang Qin
Gyan Mishra

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