Policy Traffic Switch

Data Plane Intelligence for Network Policy Control

The Policy Traffic Switch (PTS) is a key component of Sandvine’s network policy control platform, enabling the real-time application of business logic and policy enforcement on data traffic. The PTS is powered by the Sandvine Policy Engine and a high-performance packet processing operating system executing on purpose-built, carrier-grade hardware.

Within a network policy control deployment, the PTS performs three critical functions: Traffic Classification, Policy Decision-Making, and Policy Enforcement:

• The PTS provides the Sandvine Policy Engine with information about the identity and measured characteristics of network traffic for use in real-time network policy control applications
• The Sandvine Policy Engine enables PTS units to make policy decisions locally (in the data plane) without needing to interact with other decision-making systems unless additional information is required - this design delivers reduced control signaling requirements and faster policy decisions than purely centralized alternatives

Policy Traffic Switch Portfolio

The PTS portfolio includes two models, the PTS 22000 and PTS 24000, each of which is available in a range of configurations to precisely accommodate current and future requirements.

Unlike competing alternatives, the PTS provides linear scalability, an economical N:N+1 redundancy model, and correctly identifies asymmetric traffic flowing across three or more links. Additionally, PTS performance does not decrease when more ports are enabled, while other products incur processing overhead with each enabled port.

Real-World Performance in Any Fixed, Mobile or Converged Network

Fixed access operators often focus attention on inspection performance and port density, and the PTS delivers extreme throughput scalability without sacrificing efficiency. Mobile providers focus less on throughput and more on flow-oriented metrics; in a mobile network, the massive RAM in the PTS supports enormous numbers of concurrent flows and new flows per second. Converged network operators get excited about products that provide consistent behavior with any combination of access technologies, and the consistent PTS architecture, identical operating system and shared policy and operations management GUI ensures that the PTS is the ideal platform for converged operators.

With CSPs worldwide looking to reign in operations costs, performance density is as important a consideration as top-line performance. Fortunately for CSPs, the PTS offers the best of both worlds without sacrificing either: industry-leading port and performance density combined with clustering technology that efficiently achieves massive scale.