How The Time-Of-Day Activation/Deactivation Of Rules Feature Works; Transactional Rule Matching; Fastpath - Cisco ASR 5000 Series Administration Manual

▀ Enhanced Features and Functionality

How the Time-of-Day Activation/Deactivation of Rules Feature Works

The following steps describe how the Time-of-Day Activation/Deactivation of Rules feature enables charging according
to the time of the day/time:
Step 1
Timedefs are created/deleted in the ACS Configuration Mode.
A maximum of 10 timedefs can be created in an ECS service.
Step 2
Timedefs are configured in the ACS Timedef Configuration Mode. Within a timedef, timeslots specifying the day/time
for activation/deactivation of rules are configured.
A maximum of 24 timeslots can be configured in a timedef.
Step 3
In the ACS Rulebase Configuration Mode, timedefs are associated with ruledefs /groups-of-ruledefs along with the
charging action.
One timedef can be used with several ruledefs/group-of-ruledefs. If a ruledef/group-of-ruledefs does not have a timedef
associated with it, it will always be considered as active.
Step 4
When a packet is received, and a ruledef/group-of-ruledefs is eligible for rule matching, if a timedef is associated with
the ruledef/group-of-ruledefs, before rule matching, the packet-arrival time is compared with the timeslots configured in
the timedef. If the packet arrived in any of the timeslots configured in the associated timedef, rule matching is
undertaken, else the next ruledef/group-of-ruledefs is considered.
This release does not support configuring a timeslot for a specific date.
If, in a timeslot, only the time is specified, that timeslot will be applicable for all days.
If for a timeslot, "start time" > "end time", that rule will span the midnight. That is, that rule is considered to be active
from the current day until the next day.
If for a timeslot, "start day" > "end day", that rule will span over the current week till the end day in the next week.
In the following cases a rule will be active all the time:
 A timedef is not configured in an action priority
 A timedef is configured in an action priority, but the named timedef is not defined
 A timedef is defined but with no timeslots

Transactional Rule Matching

This section provides an overview of the transactional rule matching feature.
The Transactional Rule Matching (TRM) feature enables the Enhanced Charging Service (ECS) to bypass per-packet
rule matching on a transaction once the transaction is fully classified. This enables ECS to better utilize CPU resources
and accomodate additional throughput for the system, thus improving the overall performance.
A transaction for TRM can be defined as the entire UDP flow, the ACK of the 3-way handshake to the FIN/RST of a
TCP flow, or the HTTP request to the next HTTP request, or HTTP request to the FIN/RST for the final request of the
flow. The TRM feature can perform rule matching on IP L4 rules (UDP, TCP), HTTP, and HTTPS.

Fastpath

The Fastpath feature can be used to reduce the overall system performance impact as a large amount of data packet is
consumed through the ECS data path. The Fastpath feature introduces an alternate ECS data path (Fastpath) with limited
▄ Cisco ASR 5x00 Enhanced Charging Services Administration Guide
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Enhanced Charging Service Overview