User:Broadbandtme/sandbox

Intelligent Service Gateway

Intelligent Service Gateway (ISG) is a structured framework in which edge access devices can deliver flexible and scalable services to subscribers. ISG handles the following key aspects of subscriber management.


 * Subscriber identification and authentication
 * Service and policy determination
 * Session policy enforcement
 * Session life-cycle management
 * Accounting for access and service usage
 * Session state monitoring

Technical Overview

The ISG was developed in recognition of the strategic importance of service delivery in broadband networks as essential for service providers' profit growth, and understands the challenge of reducing provisioning and operational costs so as to deliver revenue-generating, value-add services to subscribers.

The Cisco ISG is an integrated, highly modular component of Cisco IOS Software, designed to accelerate and scale the delivery of value-add services to broadband subscribers, and was developed based upon Cisco's more than eight years of experience in deploying large service-oriented broadband networks with Cisco IOS Service Selection Gateway (SSG).

Cisco ISG offers service providers an opportunity to provision their network and deliver services with intelligent policies. Intelligent policies can be defined and triggered to deliver services based on the identity of subscribers or any events that occur during a session lifecycle, and can be implemented with both distributed and centralized implementation models, allowing for maximum operational flexibility. Cisco ISG can also greatly ease troubleshooting and debugging in broadband aggregation networks by conditionally monitoring designated flows. This technology can also be used for easy, scalable implementation of lawful intercept applications.

ISG Key Elements

Cisco ISG provides an innovative approach to intelligent service delivery in broadband networks. It provides a separation between business-level policy planning, event-driven policy decisions, and policy enforcement at the network layer. Cisco ISG can make decentralized policy decisions based on locally configured triggers, and optimally enforce policies while assuring available network resources are fairly distributed among active subscribers and services. Cisco ISG integrates with other policy decisions points using open, standard interfaces. This collaborative, open, and flexible policy management allows for a per-session based services. Mature, well-understood services that need to quickly and massively scale can be implemented within the highly scalable, self-contained Cisco ISG framework without burdening a centralized policy server, while new services can be rolled out with the tighter control made possible by a centralized model.
 * Identity: The ability to identify subscribers from multiple sources of network information, such as PPP ID, Source MAC address, Source-IP-Address, DHCP Option 82 information, or Web Logon, and bind this to a network session
 * Differentiated Service: Based upon the subscriber identity apply network access, QoS, and billing rules on a per session or per service basis
 * Dynamic Service Management: The ability to change the subscriber session services dynamically based upon subscriber actions on a Web portal or though business policy rules

The strength of the ISG framework is its flexibility, as the ISG simply implements the policy provided by the policy servers, allowing service providers to craft services and solutions based upon their market and subscriber needs. Given the wealth of network, AAA, and QoS options available on the ISG routing platforms, thousands of unique service offerings can be created through different policies. These policies are typical managed on policy server such as such as those provided by Cisco partners Broadhop, and Comability, at the same time the open standard interfaces used for policy communication between the ISG and the Policy Manager allows great flexibility in Policy Manager Implementation.

--Broadbandtme (talk) 12:35, 30 March 2012 (UTC)