NETWORK TRAFFIC'S ALTERNATE ROUTE

One may be able to hear a pin drop on Sprint's network, or be able to virtually reach out and touch someone on AT&T's award-winning infrastructure, but, as it is with individuals, when it comes to networks, nobody's perfect. The only way to guarantee perfection is to provide end users the ability to pick and choose whichever carrier is delivering the best service at any second of any day.

That's route optimization. And a few years ago, route optimization was ahead of its time. A number of vendors popped up to offer traffic monitoring and flow control solutions, but as Seng-Poh Lee, vice president business development and marketing at InfiniRoute Networks, said, “Route optimization is almost like a solution looking for a problem. Until you find an application that can benefit from it, it is hard for any carrier or enterprise to justify it.”

With the acceleration of VoIP, gaming and streaming video, it appears as if the solution has found its problem. Early players in this space have consolidated to form new companies such as InfiniRoute, which merged IP Delivery and Proficient Networks, and Internap Network Services, which acquired netVmg and Sockeye Networks. Both companies now combine hardware and software solutions with services to provide enterprises and carriers new real-time routing alternatives based on quality and other business policies to guarantee service.

Some hosting companies, such as Carpathia Hosting, turn to route optimization solution providers like RouteScience and data center providers Equinix to provide the same.

Route optimization solutions monitor several potential paths simultaneously and evaluate the performance based on jitter, latency and packet loss, then apply their own or customers' individual business policies to choose the best path for the particular applications contained within those packets.

For InfiniRoute, that application is primarily VoIP. The company provides managed services for international VoIP peering. It provides gateways to service providers looking to convert TDM traffic to VoIP and gain access to the international voice termination market. InfiniRoute also hosts its route optimization product in its own data center, which has high-speed interconnections to nine different carriers.

“Today, the international VoIP termination business is really best effort,” Seng-Poh said. Best effort may work in traditional IP peering, but the voice component changes everything.

“IP peering is a mutual exchange of data with no concern as to the value of one packet vs. another. In the VoIP world there is a different value to each of those packets,” Seng-Poh said.

While vendors and interconnect providers (in the case of InfiniRoute and Internap, they are both) have different approaches to choosing the optimal route, they all agree that border gateway protocol (BGP), the routing technology used in most networks, falls short of optimizing traffic flows from a business perspective.

BGP chooses its routes from a technology perspective, which is the shortest number of hops to a destination. It doesn't take performance, actual cost or the priority of a user into consideration, which the route optimization technology does.

“We see significant market opportunity for optimization technology just to help customers understand and manage their [Internet-based] networks the same way they were able to manage their private networks before,” said Chris Oberkfell, director of product development at Internap.

Research firm IDC has projected the WAN optimization opportunity to grow from just under $250 million today to about $450 million by 2008.

Internap provides both network-based and premises-based route optimization. Through a nationally distributed array of private network access points (P-NAPs) and its intelligent routing platform, Internap continually analyzes traffic performance on major Internet backbones and selects the optimal path for business-critical information. The technology lets customers make decisions about diversity, route selection and quality in an automated way without having to have an army of BGP engineers to make it happen, Oberkfell said.

The company also offers managed services such as security, storage, VPN and router services and uses route optimization as a differentiator, but is increasingly successful in selling the optimization as value-added tiered service.

“Having the ability to simultaneously weigh both performance and cost by application or by user is a very powerful capability,” Oberkfell said.

Not all providers have been so lucky. Customers want optimized networks, but they don't always want to pay. Carpathia Networks CEO Rick Smith said that while optimization so far has not been used as a value-added service, it does help the hosting provider be more cost competitive.

“We don't charge a premium right now, but it allows us to win business that we couldn't have won before,” Smith said.

On the cost side, continuously monitoring the network allows Carpathia to always pick the least cost route when competing network providers are performing equally.

Carpathia has 1700 customers who use its data center facilities (supplied by Equinix) and services to transport all types of traffic including VoIP and gaming. The company has seven Gigabit Ethernet connections to various network providers that it calls the Carpathian Intelligent Routing Network.

“Because we have so many transit providers, we needed to take full advantage of the routing possibilities and BGP doesn't do that,” Smith said.

Carpathia uses route optimization technology from RouteScience to do so. “They allow us to tune things based on the type of application our customers are using. It makes for happy customers and allows us to take full advantage of the investment we have made,” Smith said.

It also gives them a little more leverage with network service providers. While Tier 1 carriers are not big customers of route optimization, Internet service providers that use it to provide the best quality of service to their customers also are using it to change their interconnect relationships.

Carpathia uses the data from monitoring all of its transport providers to track which is performing well and which is not. “The bottom line is, if they don't perform, we can't use them,” Smith said. “Signing a long-term commitment with a service provider we end up not using doesn't do us any good.”

Smith acknowledges that all transport providers have issues from time to time, and with interconnection to seven providers, that is almost acceptable. However, his company plans to take better advantage of the technology at contract renewal time. “We had these contracts in place before we put in the RouteScience solution, so as we renew our contracts we will get provisions based on certain performance parameters we can measure now that we couldn't before,” Smith said.

RouteScience is one of the survivors, having lasted five years and — more recently — an exhaustive evaluation procedure by Carpathia. The company, formed in 1999 by former Cisco Systems and NetSys Technologies executives, goes beyond monitoring and routing to actively adjusting the network.

RouteScience's Adaptive Networking Software (ANS) takes base-level network parameters gleaned from passive and active network performance monitoring and applies application models that determine if individual applications are meeting its customers' customers' business policies.

If a network is providing inadequate service, the ANS will adjust the path, override the BGP routing and switch facilities. This has resulted in a 30% to 40% improvement in the level of service Carpathia has been able to provide to its customers.

“We don't just complain about the weather, we do something about it,” said Tim Lee-Thorp, vice president of marketing for RouteScience.

Lee-Thorp said the ANS will dynamically adjust a fully distributed network infrastructure and attempts to “bring it into spec” before it becomes necessary to switch routes.

“I'm not proposing some auto-magical fix here like doing network provisioning on the fly. That's still rocket science,” Lee-Thorp said. “But we measure end to end from a user's desktop to the end server while looking at all the possible paths that connection could take and if it dips below policy levels, we flip it onto a new path.”

RouteScience predefines what it thinks are reasonable values for different applications, but leaves the system open to customization by the end user to coincide with their business policies.

Like other route optimization technology companies, RouteScience hasn't had much luck piercing the Tier 1 market. “We've had discussions with all the big boys and to date we have failed miserably,” Lee-Thorp said. He blames it on politics and that carriers are so used to owning their own environments they can't get their heads around the idea that route optimization could benefit them.

Carriers may not have a need today for this type of route optimization, but changes in routing philosophy overall could change that. According to Lee-Thorp, a new competitor has “joined the fray” in route optimization. It is one who company founders are very familiar with. And to hear Lee-Thorp tell it, it sounds like we could be in for some entertaining legal squabbles.

Cisco has a new feature in its latest IOS release call optimized edge routing. “It's an exact rip-off of the RouteScience ANS,” Lee-Thorp said.

Regardless, he considers Cisco's move into this brand of route optimization a good thing. “It is the greatest thing that ever happened to us because Cisco has now basically told their entire installed base that this is how they should be doing networks,” Lee-Thorp said. “[They're saying] this is application-aware networking, and you have to get on the bandwagon. It's a gift from the gods, and suddenly we can't keep up with the calls.”

Maybe that's a good sign for the job market. Either way, the renewed interest in route optimization and intelligent routing is another example of how applications such as gaming, video and VoIP, which can't survive on best-effort routing and quality of service, will drive changes in the next-generation network. And it is enough to plant the thought of one day doing away the whole concept of dedicated, point-to-point facilities.