Deep Packet Inspection In Wireless- Changing Your Design or Workflows?

[Lee H Badman]

>From Cisco's 7.4 Controller Code release notes:

*[http://www.cisco.com/en/US/i/templates/blank.gif]Support for Application 
Visibility and Control (AVC) is introduced. AVC classifies applications using 
Cisco's Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) techniques with Network-Based Application 
Recognition (NBAR) engine and provides application-level visibility and control 
into Wi-Fi network. After recognizing the applications, the AVC feature allows 
you to either drop or mark the traffic.
Using AVC, the controller can detect more than 1000 applications. AVC enables 
you to perform real-time analysis and create policies to reduce network 
congestion, costly network link usage, and infrastructure upgrades.
*[http://www.cisco.com/en/US/i/templates/blank.gif]Support for NetFlow protocol 
is introduced. The NetFlow protocol provides information about network users 
and applications, peak usage times, and traffic routing. The NetFlow protocol 
collects IP traffic information from network devices to monitor traffic.
The NetFlow architecture consists of the following components:
-[http://www.cisco.com/en/US/i/templates/blank.gif]Collector-Entity that 
collects all the IP traffic information from various network elements.
-[http://www.cisco.com/en/US/i/templates/blank.gif]Exporter-Network entity that 
exports the template with the IP traffic information. The controller acts as an 
exporter.

I know that other wireless vendors are also now doing/claiming to do Deep 
Packet Inspection in the controllers/Aps/magic modules, etc. I'm wondering if:

- anyone is yet gaining real value by having DPI on the wireless side (as 
opposed to, or in addition to in the core or on the wired edge)
- where you are somewhat specialized (wireless engineers, wired engineers, 
security staff, no significant overlap), are you finding the move to wireless 
DPI having any effect on the "who does what" factor?
- has anyone actually taken the plunge on 7.4, and doing anything yet with DPI? 
(I know it's brand new- wondering if anyone was a beta site, perhaps).


Thanks, and Happy New Year to both lists,



Lee Badman



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