Understanding Application-Aware Policy Control for Subscriber Management

You can configure application-aware policy control, which defines the treatment to apply to a subscriber’s packets based on the specific application being used by the subscriber (for example, Facebook) or based on Layer 3 and Layer 4 service data flow (SDF) information for the IP flow (for example, the source and destination IP addresses).

You configure application-aware policy control by configuring policy and charging control (PCC) rules, which identify the conditions that must be met (such as the application that the traffic is using) and the action to take on that traffic (such as specifying a maximum bit rate). PCC rules can be activated for a subscriber in one of two ways:

• PCC rule activation control by dynamic profile—The dynamic profile assigned to a subscriber identifies a static PCEF profile, which specifies PCC rules. The dynamic profile indicates whether to activate all the rules in the PCEF profile or just a subset of the rules. The PCEF profile and PCC rule names can be variables in the dynamic profile, and the names are obtained by RADIUS during subscriber authorization.

• PCC rule activation by a policy and charging rules function (PCRF) server—A PCRF can directly activate a PCC rule that is configured on a router by sending a Rule-Install-Name AVP over the Gx interface to the router during service activation. The specified PCC rule must be identified in a dynamic PCEF profile. If the Rule-Install-Name is also the name of a dynamic profile, then the rule is ignored and the dynamic profile is used.