Availability, Reliability, Scalability, Flexibility, Manageability
The Unison™ Mobile Internet Platform is a full-featured, versatile and mature platform with a wide range of capabilities that allow operators to process traffic in many different ways. The Unison platform can handle a variety of traffic types – such as WAP, Web, media, and email – from a variety of devices – such as laptops, feature phones, smartphones, and iPhones. As a result, it is an ideal system for operator platform consolidation.
Policy Management
At the heart of the Unison platform is a robust policy management architecture that provides operators with fine-grained control over how the system processes and applies services to traffic. A policy consists of a set of criteria and actions. The criteria define the specific traffic to which the policy applies; the actions define the treatment the traffic will receive. Policies may leverage both Unison internal resources and external resources provided by third parties.
Unison policy management consists of the following logical functions:
- Context-based flow classification
- Protocol and content handlers
- Policy intelligence and enforcement
The Unison Platform as a Policy Enforcement Point in the PCC Architecture
Modular Architecture
The Unison platform features a modular architecture that combines highly available, scalable and flexible deployments with low operating expenses. Packet processing is performed in software deployed on a standard off-the-shelf server or blade system. The traffic processing blades are managed by two management blades that deploy software called the Control and State Module (CSM).
The CSM provides management services for the Unison cluster, including configuration management, alarm and event management, and session and subscriber management. CSMs are deployed in an active/standby mode for redundancy.
The number of traffic processing blades is scaled to the volume of network traffic. Bytemobile plug-in services on the Unison platform may be deployed in additional blades as required to provide:
- Web optimization
- Video optimization
- Content adaptation
- Widget bar insertion
- Ad insertion
- User analytics
- Content filtering
The Unison solution includes an off-the-shelf load balancer to distribute the packet processing load across multiple processing servers and to facilitate redundancy and failover.
System Management
As carrier-grade infrastructure software in the data path, the Unison platform adheres to the most stringent reliability, availability and manageability requirements. It not only applies services but also understands usage patterns. The platform’s extensive management capabilities provide administrators with multiple ways to configure and monitor every aspect of the system, including subscribers, sessions and devices.
The Unison platform is built on standard, commercial off-the-shelf hardware running the Sun Microsystems Solaris operating system. Bytemobile offers sizing and dimensioning tools to assist operators in determining the exact configuration required for any projected capacity.
