What is DFI

Identification and treatment of application flows are important to many application providers and network operators. They often rely on these capabilities to deploy and/or support a wide range of applications. These applications generate flows that may have specific characteristics such as bandwidth or latency that can be met if made known to the network. Historically, this functionality has been implemented to the extent possible using heuristics that inspect and infer flow characteristics. Heuristics may be based on port numbers, network identifiers (e.g., subnets or VLANs, Deep Flow Inspection (DFI), or Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)). However, many application flows in current usages are dynamic, adaptive, time-bound, encrypted, peer-to-peer (P2P), asymmetric, used on multipurpose devices, and/ or have different priorities depending on the direction of the flow, user preferences, and other factors. Any combination of these properties renders heuristic-based techniques less effective and may result in compromises to application security or user privacy. Application-enabled collaborative networking (AECN) is a framework in which applications explicitly signal their flow characteristics and requirements to the network. This provides network nodes with knowledge of the application flow characteristics, which enables them to apply the correct flow treatment and provide feedback to applications accordingly. This chapter describes how an application enabled collaborative networking framework contributes to solve the encountered problems.