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 (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.) application to manage enterprise communication ecosystem.

Unified Communications provides a seamless user experience 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—Aruba Central receives call control information from the APs. The Unified Communications application uses this data to detect and classify the traffic type. Unified Communications dynamically prioritizes the voice and video traffic over data traffic. Unified Communications uses the heuristics method for session prioritization. A built-in heuristics engine detects and prioritizes the required traffic. Unified Communications uses the heuristics data detection to identify the clients in a call. Unified Communications uses the heuristics data classification method to classify and prioritize the media packets.

Licensing

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

Heuristics Classification

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

• For a voice or video call, Unified Communications triggers classify-media in the ACL Access Control List. ACL is a common way of restricting certain types of traffic on a physical port. and marks the clients as media-capable. Unified Communications attempts to classify the media. 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.  classifies the session. Based on the Unified Communications or DPI classification, apply the AppRF rules.
• 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 or destination port numbers above 1023 from or to the media-capable users go through DPI.
• 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, Unified Communications uses the payload type in the RTP header to determine if it is a voice or video session.

Unified Communications opens the specific ports and sends the packets 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

Unified Communications only adjusts the DSCP Differentiated Services Code Point. DSCP is a 6-bit packet header value used for traffic classification and priority assignment. or 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 a user-roles denies the traffic, Unified Communications does not perform heuristics for that session and sets the D flag.

Monitoring Unified Communications

Monitor Unified Communications in the summary and list views:

• Unified Communications Summary View
• Unified Communications List View

Unified Communications Configuration

To configure Unified Communications, see Unified Communications Configuration.