An enterprise or business may maintain multiple offices in various locations. The business may subscribe to a communication service provider. The communication services may be defined, at least in part, by a service level agreement (SLA) that may define a class of service (CoS), a bandwidth, and other key communication parameters. A quality of service (QoS) and/or a class of service associated with the communication service may also be stated or implied in the SLA. An SLA may also define service availability, time to identify the cause of a customer-affecting malfunction, time to repair a customer affecting-malfunction, service provisioning time, and/or other metrics.
Virtual private networks (VPN) may be used by businesses to communicate confidentially within the business, between different sites, offices, or campuses, over a public communications network. VPN traffic can be carried over a public network infrastructure, such as the Internet, on top of standard protocols, or over a service provider network (SPN) with a defined SLA between the subscriber and the service provider. A VPN can send a variety of communications traffic including data, voice, video, or a combination of these and other traffic. In some cases, VPNs may be provided based on multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) techniques. While traversing the network, communications may travel via different paths through different devices, depending on the availability of a given device at a given time.
The subscriber may obtain connectivity to the Internet by subscribing to an Internet service provided by a service provider network. The service provider network may provide Internet service via a port on a router operated by the service provider network. The port on the router may be dedicated or reserved primarily or completely for the use of the subscriber. The subscriber connectivity to the Internet may be provided directly or indirectly by a single communication link from the subscriber to a port on a router. A router is an electronic device that provides connectivity between two networks and typically supports routing of data packets to other network nodes based on addresses embedded in the header of the data packets. Data packets may traverse from one site of the business to another site of the business via an almost-infinite number of paths through the Internet.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds