It's no secret voice and video traffic can require some special handling to keep networks running smoothly. In an effort to improve voice and video QoS, Allot Communications is teaming with specialists Qosmos and PeerApp to give service providers and large enterprises more granular control over WAN and Internet traffic.

Allot’s roots are in bandwidth management. The company’s centralized management system, NetXplorer, configures QoS policies which are implemented via its NetEnforcer or Service Gateway products. Service Gateway is a product Allot introduced last year that allows companies to put on a single platform both Allot’s deep packet inspection (DPI) technology and “adjacent applications” such as a partner’s quality monitoring or security products, says Cam Cullen, Allot’s director of product management for the Americas.

One year later, Allot has unveiled it’s first partnerships for the Service Gateway platform.

On the voice front, Allot unveiled a joint solution with Qosmos, whose technology extracts data from VoIP call detail records to enable applications such as VoIP charging and monitoring, usage tracking and anti-fraud. Allot’s DPI devices work in conjunction with Qosmos Information Extraction appliances to capture business-critical data and implement QoS policies for VoIP services.

Qosmos’ specialty is inspecting “not just traditional SIP or H.323 voice, but also things like Skype traffic, Vonage, and other IM and chat protocols,” Cullen says. “So an enterprise that’s relying on Yahoo Messenger or Google Talk as an internal tool to communicate between branches can get the same level of quality monitoring for that traffic as they would for traditional voice traffic.”

Meanwhile, through a partnership with PeerApp, Allot is integrating its own DPI and application-identification technologies with PeerApp’s media caching and acceleration technology to optimize the delivery of video and P2P content over the Internet.

Deployed together, Allot’s DPI engine identifies Internet video streams in real time and redirects them to PeerApp’s UltraBand platform, which uses caching technology to free up bandwidth and speed the download process.

“When the DPI product sees that this is the type of product being requested by the user, rather than trying to prioritize that traffic -- which would be a traditional DPI usage -- what we’re doing is redirecting that traffic to PeerApp’s cache appliance,” Cullen says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.