Unified Communications

The growing use of Wi-Fi Wi-Fi is a technology that allows electronic devices to connect to a WLAN network, mainly using the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radio bands. Wi-Fi can apply to products that use any 802.11 standard. and the proliferation of mobile tablet and smartphone clients cause control and visibility challenges for communication and collaboration applications. To overcome these challenges, Aruba offers the Unified Communications application to manage your enterprise communication ecosystem.

The Unified Communications application on Aruba devices provides a seamless user experience for voice calls, video calls, and application sharing when using communication and collaboration tools. The Unified Communications application actively monitors voice, video, and application sharing sessions, provides traffic visibility, and allows you to prioritize the required sessions. The Unified Communications application also leverages the functions of the service engine on the cloud platform and provides rich visual metrics for analytical purposes.

The Unified Communications application supports the following functions based on the type of device used in the solution:

• Session visibility—The Unified Communications application provides call session visibility correlated across the network to simplify operations for the network administrator. The administrators can monitor wireless and wired network connectivity health on a per-session basis and analyze the quality of experience.
• Session prioritization—Based on the type of device provisioned in your network, Aruba Central receives call control information from Instant APs, controllers, and switches. The Unified Communications application uses this data to detect and classify the traffic type and dynamically prioritize the voice and video traffic over data traffic. The heuristics method is used for session prioritization. A built-in heuristics engine detects the Unified Communications traffic and prioritizes the required traffic. The heuristics data detection and classification method is used to identify the clients in a call and classify and prioritize the media packets. Switches do not support heuristics-based prioritization.

Unified Communications Versions

Unified Communications is available in version 1 and version 2. The Unified Communications service in Aruba Central automatically determines which version to use based on the Aruba Instant version running on the Instant AP.

In version 1, Unified Communications uses OpenFlow OpenFlow is an open communications interface between control plane and the forwarding layers of a network. protocol to communicate with Instant APs, which run Aruba Instant version lower than 8.10.0.0.

In version 2, Unified Communications uses WebSocket protocol to communicate with Instant APs, which run Aruba Instant version 8.10.0.0 or higher than 8.10.0.0. In version 2, the Instant APs manage the call prioritization based on configuration from Aruba Central and depend on the Unified Communications service only during roaming or session synchronization failures. The Instant APs push the call data visibility information to the Unified Communications service on Aruba Central.

Licensing

Aruba Central licensing is applicable to Unified Communications applications. Unified Communications is available with Advanced AP licenses.

Heuristics Classification

For heuristics classifications, the Instant APs perform deep packet inspection on the traffic to determine voice and video traffic. The order of heuristics classifications is detection, prioritization, and visualization. The heuristics classification method includes the following steps:

• When the voice or video call is established, classify-media in the ACL Access Control List. ACL is a common way of restricting certain types of traffic on a physical port. is triggered and clients are marked as media-capable clients. If DPI Deep Packet Inspection. DPI is an advanced method of network packet filtering that is used for inspecting data packets exchanged between the devices and systems over a network. DPI functions at the Application layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model and enables users to identify, categorize, track, reroute, or stop packets passing through a network. is enabled, Unified Communications attempts to classify the media first and DPI is attempted next. The session is classified accordingly by DPI. AppRF rules can be based on the classification done by Unified Communications or DPI.
• Any subsequent UDP User Datagram Protocol. UDP is a part of the TCP/IP family of protocols used for data transfer. UDP is typically used for streaming media. UDP is a stateless protocol, which means it does not acknowledge that the packets being sent have been received. data flow with source/destination port numbers above 1023 from or to media-capable users go through the DPI engine.
• If an RTP Real-Time Transport Protocol. RTP is a network protocol used for delivering audio and video over IP networks. session is based on DPI, the payload type in the RTP header is used to determine if it is a voice or video session.

When Unified Communications starts, the specific ports that are used by signaling protocols are opened and the packets are sent for processing.

The following table lists the port information.

Table 1: Unified Communications Ports

ALG Application Layer Gateway. ALG is a security component that manages application layer protocols such as SIP, FTP and so on.	Protocol	Port	Protocol
svc-sips	TCP Transmission Control Protocol. TCP is a communication protocol that defines the standards for establishing and maintaining network connection for applications to exchange data.	5061	SIPS
svc-sip-tcp	TCP	5060	SIP Session Initiation Protocol. SIP is used for signaling and controlling multimedia communication session such as voice and video calls.
svc-sip-udp	UDP	5060	SIP

The heuristic solution only adjusts the DSCP Differentiated Services Code Point. DSCP is a 6-bit packet header value used for traffic classification and priority assignment. /QoS Quality of Service. It refers to the capability of a network to provide better service and performance to a specific network traffic over various technologies. for the session and provides visibility if the user-role of the client permits the traffic. If traffic is denied by user-role, then the heuristic for that client session is not performed and the D flag is set.

See the following sections for information about configuring and monitoring UCC Unified Communications and Collaboration. UCC is a term used to describe the integration of various communications methods with collaboration tools such as virtual whiteboards, real-time audio and video conferencing, and enhanced call control capabilities.:

• Configuring Unified Communications
• Monitoring Unified Communications in Summary View
• Monitoring Unified Communications in List View