By Carl Klatsky Senior Principal Engineer Comcast Aju Kalarickal Principal Engineer Comcast Ananda Mahalingham Senior Engineer Comcast Jimit Salvi Engineer III Comcast Eswaramoorthy Subramaniam Principal Engineer Comcast Aditya Vallabhajosyula Senior Engineer Comcast
During the SCTE (Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers) 2023 Cable TechExpo, the authors introduce a new network element called the Virtual Services Gateway (VSG) [1]. The VSG can be used to address several challenges faced by network operators, including collecting customer experience metrics and reducing packet attacks. The VSG integrates with the Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) or Virtual Cable Modem Termination System (VCMTS) providing new services to both end customers and the network operator. The VSG is in the logical path of the customer data packets enabling byte usage and quality analysis use-cases. These initial use-cases are implemented using copies of the customer data packets. In this paper the authors propose a new use-case, providing security protection for the customer and the operator infrastructure by dropping or rate limiting malicious attack packets while transparently forwarding non-attack packets. The VSG can implement this use-case by virtue of its unique position in the data packet path.