Application-aware Networking (APN) Framework

A multitude of applications are carried over the network, which have varying needs for network bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss, etc. Some new emerging applications (e.g. 5G) have very demanding performance requirements. However, in current networks, the network and applications are decoupled, that is, the network is not aware of the applications' requirements in a fine granularity. Therefore, it is difficult to provide truly fine-granularity traffic operations for the applications and guarantee their SLA requirements. This document proposes a new framework, named Application-aware Networking (APN), where application characteristic information such as application identification and its network performance requirements is carried in the packet encapsulation in order to facilitate service provisioning, perform application-level traffic steering and network resource adjustment.