Procera Explains the New NAT and Steering Features

Procera Networks published a white paper - "Intelligent Policy Enforcement and Application Delivery Networking - Advanced Traffic Steering and Carrier Grade NAT Technology Deployments" (here), explaining the features it has released earlier this week for network and cloud service provider (see "Procera Adds Application and Subscriber-Aware Solutions to Cloud Service Providers" - here).

• Advanced Traffic Steering - "PacketLogic Advanced Traffic Steering combines the subscriber and service awareness of the PacketLogic Subscriber Manager with the Application Awareness of the PacketLogic Real-Time Enforcement. The PSM provisions the PRE with the Traffic Steering policies, which can be based on subscriber ID, subscriber service plan (for example subscriber is under 18), location, and device attributes, and combined with the specific traffic or application types that will receive traffic steering treatment"

• Carrier Grade NAT - "PacketLogic Carrier Grade NAT is the first IPE-based large scale NAT solution for network operators. Network operators are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their subscriber growth with their existing address space. Most operators do not have the ability to request more address space from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), as there is very little address space available (none in some regions). As a result, operators are attempting to launch IPv6 services to ease address congestion, but this rollout has been hindered by many different engineering and product challenges. As a result, operators are attempting to deploy Carrier Grade NAT (also known as Large Scale NAT) to ease their address shortages. The challenge with implementing with current CGN products is that they lack subscriber and service plan awareness, and most are not designed to scale with transparent stateful processing of application traffic".