Overview of SAC

Definition

Service Awareness (SA) is a smart application protocol identification and classification engine. Smart Application Control (SAC) uses service awareness technology to detect and identify Layer 4 to Layer 7 information such as HTTP and RTP in packets, and implements fine-grained QoS management based on the classification result.

Purpose

As network and multimedia technologies develop fast, network applications become diversified and bandwidth resources are increasingly insufficient. In particular, P2P technology is widely used. P2P applications are extended to voice and video fields in addition to file sharing, and P2P users and traffic increase explosively. Many P2P applications may even abuse network resources. As a result, network congestion occurs. When both P2P traffic and traffic of key applications are transmitted, non-key services occupy much bandwidth, core services are lost, delay and jitter are uncontrollable, and service quality cannot be guaranteed. Users urgently want to control these unauthorized applications, so service detection technology is used.

Traditional traffic classification technology only checks the content of Layer 4 and lower layers in packets, for example, source address, destination address, source port, destination port, and service type. It cannot analyze applications in packets. Service detection technology is traffic detection and control technology based on the application layer. Apart from the IP packet header, service detection technology can analyze the content of the application layer. Service awareness technology intelligently classified applications, identifies key services, ensures bandwidth for key services, and limits traffic of non-key service traffic to ensure stable and efficient transmission of core services.