Building block approach

Qosmos provides the foundation on which Network Equipment Providers, Telecom Equipment Manufacturers, Software Vendors and Systems Integrators can integrate state of the art network intelligence features into their solutions to feed third party systems with highly specific, valuable information. Our partners and clients benefit from Qosmos expertise in the field of network information extraction, which leaves them free to concentrate on their core business.

The building blocks consist of a Software Development Kit, Qosmos ixEngine, and a complete range of appliances, Qosmos ixMachine.

Flexibility accross a range of applications

The Qosmos network intelligence technology has been designed for use across a wide range of applications and for smooth extension to new domains. As an example, the same Qosmos ixEngine can be initially deployed for monitoring and troubleshooting, then extended to network optimization, and finally to multi-tiered services. This is a future-proof and low-risk approach that supports evolving business needs with a continuously extendable, all-in-one technology. As your domains of application grow, so does your ability to exploit the information involved.

Adaptation to different applications also requires easy implementation of new protocols. To this end, Qosmos uses a software-based approach, which translates into flexibility, easy updates and notably short development times - new protocols can be implemented in a matter of days. To ensure high packet processing performance, the Qosmos software runs on top of the latest standards-based, multi-core architecture. In high-traffic situations, it can even work in parallel with custom ASICs performing pattern-matching functions, to provide the best of both worlds: hardware processing for high-volume standard traffic combined with software processing for advanced session correlation and fast implementation of new protocol libraries.

Portability across a range of hardware platforms and networked devices

In order to extend the benefits of network intelligence technology to new areas and to reduce Capex, it is essential to tap into an IP network from a number of connected devices and not be tied to specific hardware platforms. For this reason, Qosmos network intelligence technology has been designed for portability: it supports market-leading CPU architectures, (Intel x86, Cavium, Freescale, and more) and it has been validated on platforms such as Bivio, Continuous Computing, GE Fanuc, and IBM.

Thanks to an open and flexible architecture with standard APIs that ensure fast integration into 3rd party solutions, the Qosmos protocol recognition and extraction engine can also be ported onto appliances, routers, IP DSLAMs, GGSNs in mobile networks, IPTV Set-Top-Boxes, etc.

This portability translates into a number of benefits for Solution Vendors and System Integrators: they can continue to use existing manufacturing, development and sales processes, they enjoy fast time-to-market and they can take advantage of a range of hardware platforms.

Qosmos network intelligence technology is also highly scalable, offering solutions from access to core networks for various throughputs up to 80 Gbps.

Accuracy and depth of information extraction

For superior precision in identifying and extracting information, Qosmos network intelligence technology inspects complete IP flows, tracks control connections (e.g. FTP data, SIP/RTP or P2P traffic) and creates a full view of each application, service, and user, independently of the protocols involved. Application logic is decoded and correlated data flows are grouped into complete, meaningful sessions, providing a detailed understanding of communication intent. For example, in the case of IP telephony, it is crucial to differentiate between IP packets used for authentication (Radius), signaling (SIP) and voice (RTP).

In addition, a full view can be created for each user, by grouping all communications used by the same person: VoIP, Instant Messaging, Webmail, FTP, etc. correlating information to reconstitute the complete communication session.

Qosmos network intelligence technology recognizes a vast number of protocols and applications and can extracts a wide range of attributes such as: service classification (protocol name, encapsulation information), performance (bandwidth usage, volumes, delays), usages (URLs, IMSI, type of attached document), identifiers (caller, called party, login, passwords, etc.), subject of messages in plain text (email, chat), content of messages in plain text (email, chat), content of attached documents (Word, PPT documents), application data (VoIP RTP payload, etc.), queries (Web applications, database). In addition, Qosmos network intelligence technology is engineered to accurately identify encapsulated information, including tunneled protocols such as L2TP (Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol), GTP (GPRS Tunneling Protocol), or GRE (Generic Route Encapsulation), etc. (See figure below)

Qosmos network intelligence technology uses a unique query and information extraction language specially designed to query the network as if it were a database, and filters the extracted information to present only the flows of specific interest. It can either generate a structured database view of network traffic or stream the extracted information in real time for further processing and storage. Customized CDRs are generated, which can be used to build a complete solution including reporting tools, appliances and applications. (See diagram below).