Even companies in the business of Information Technology — who clearly know their own area well, often need help in areas outside of their Core competnecies, DVI can fill this gap in many specific instances, including technology infrastructure and networking systems deployment.
SES Americom required technical support in reviewing and overseeing the development of the detailed design for the terrestrial interfaces to the Public Internet and Client VPNs for the Maritime Broadband (MBB) system. DVI reviewed the detailed design of the traffic routing and filtering conventions (from–to the terrestrial network to the Space segment) taking in to account all addresses including both client and SES M&C traffic. Specifically, the primary mission was to provide a Network design that can:
- Support both Public and Private IP address to end users (traffic routing network may segment traffic to enable a special class of service using Public IP addresses by backhauling that traffic only to a central internet backbone access point)
- Provide IP bandwidth monitoring and alarming for end users
- Facilitate Speed Testing of the Class of Service assigned for each end user
- Provide Network wide Monitor & Alarm functions for intrusion and virus activity
- Allow the flexibility for customer collocated equipment at the hub – example: pass customer IP packets from the shared network to the customer’s VPN router for back haul to a Customer’s facility.
- Meet the networking requirements of the system defined in the MBB System Requirements Specification document.
- Provide the necessary OSS outputs to the SES BSS systems as defined by the SES Americom IT department.
- In support of item #3, review the capabilities of the traffic shaper application to be proposed by the MBB Hub provider for deployment at the teleport sites. This traffic shaper provided Quality of Service by determining appropriate throughput for the various terminals based on their class of service. The traffic shaper also controlled routing of datagrams through a Performance Enhancing Proxy (part of the hub) which can benefit from TCP acceleration, while directly routing datagrams such as VPN data.
- In support of item #1-7, reviewed the capabilities of the OSS to be proposed by the MBB Hub provider for deployment in the system to hand off required inputs to the SES Americom system for billing and other related functions. This OSS system was a relatively simple system collecting information from a hub administrative server about performance, number of terminals and class of service per terminal. Information about number of terminals and class of service were logged in a flat file. The information will be recovered via SFTP over a VPN to Americom’s headquarters facility in Princeton, NJ to a back office suite of SAP/Seibel to support billing functions. Performance data was accessed over a VPN to the Americom NOC at Americom’s Woodbine MD facility for remote operations of the third party teleport. Equivalent data for the local hub at the Woodbine facility will be collected and directly routed into the appropriate network(s) at Woodbine.
- Assess the capability of the interfaces to be proposed by the MBB Hub provider for routing, prioritization, etc. schemes for VoIP, cellular over IP (picocell generation 2.5 that supports voice and data, such as GPRS or EDGE cells for voice and data into handheld devices like Blackberry), and segmenting Public IP subscriber traffic for backhaul to a central internet backbone access point.
- Finally we worked with SES Americom and the MBB Hub provider to ensure that the network development proceeded according to SES’s milestone schedule.
