How Ipdr Has Improved the Service Management?

We are all aware of IPDR which is a standard two-way interface that makes it possible to gather and redistribute data from the IP environment. In the modern age, optimizing the usage of bandwidth, which is one of our most finite resources, is one of the most stressful tasks for any cable operator.

It's quite known that the lack of tools to assist in determining who is using it, what it is being used for, and when it is being used is asking us to spend our CapEx and OpEx resources adds to the challenges in managing data capacity and throughput, or bandwidth in the data world.

With the use of Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR), we are now able to respond to these queries and start leveraging the information gathered to predict consumption trends in the future. We can learn everything about service management with IPDR in this article.

Evolution Of IPDR

Previously, the cable edge network was most visibly managed by the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). SNMP used to offer a sophisticated network management architecture; however, it had limitations in terms of scalability and dependability. Then, dynamic quality of service (QoS)-based services were brought about by the expansion of DOCSIS technology, expanding the edge management model from network-oriented to service-oriented.

But in order to provide visibility into service behavior and the overall subscriber experience, a more thorough, effective, and the accurate data-gathering system was required given the expanding role that service management plays inside the provider's delivery network. With the introduction of IPDR, several new service definitions and protocol capabilities that offer high-resolution network, service, and broadband management solutions like subscriber visibility are made available.

IPDR Management Services

Through IPDR, intelligent service management offers improved management models like:

Metered billing based on subscriber and service usage.
Planning and analysis of network capacity.
Resource management on the edge.
Asset and network inventory management.
Monitoring of service-level objectives (SLO) for commercial services.
Monitoring of quality of experience (QoE).
Analytics for product development and service optimization.

Data gathering through IPDR does not guarantee to completely replace existing SNMP-based polling and network management tools, it does offer certain distinctive capabilities for obtaining thorough subscriber-by-subscriber, service-by-service flow statistics.

This makes it especially suitable for gathering information about individual cable modem devices that are stored in the Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS), such as subscriber traffic consumption, which is just a way of providing broadband subscriber analytics.

IPDR Benefits

The IPDR protocol offers a number of significant advantages that improve the operator's capacity to gather information from the edge network.

High availability: The protocol has capabilities that permit automated fail-over in the case of a server or connection failure. Operators can create redundant channels for valuable record streams in this way.
Dependability: IPDR offers connection-oriented transport reliability via the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Record acknowledgment at the application layer additionally adds resilience.
Scalability: The IPDR protocol offers a novel method for gathering data from the network due to its stream-oriented characteristics. By "pushing" event-based records to the collection layer, the exporter eliminates the inefficiencies and expenses associated with polling.
Efficiency: IPDR uses a binary format to implement messages. This produces extremely small data records that use little network capacity and incur the least amount of encoding and decoding costs.

Bottom Line

With IPDR Collector, we now have a way of describing the patterns of service flow consumption that are based on regulations. It is now possible to manage such edge resources in a quasi-real-time way by allocating them to the services that require them the most because the per-flow data has been gathered and kept in repositories that can compile this information depending on chosen criteria.

By delivering a key component that will enable a common language to be spoken by the multi-play network, IPDR has the opportunity to unify decisions regarding bandwidth, policy, capacity, and resource allocation. As a result, the universal edge resource manager (ERM) will be able to control the shared resources used by all of a provider's services.