Application-oriented networking (AON) involves network devices designed to aid in computer-to-computer application integration. Application-oriented networks are sometimes called "intelligent networks" or "content-based routing networks" and they are generally network technology that can use the content of a

network packet In telecommunications and computer networking, a network packet is a formatted unit of Data (computing), data carried by a packet-switched network. A packet consists of control information and user data; the latter is also known as the ''Payload ...

or message to take some sort of action. Application-oriented networking was popularized by

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...

in response to increasing use of

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

messaging (combined with related standards such as

XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text, or XSL Formatting Objects. These formats c ...

XPath XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1999, and can be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or ...

and

XQuery XQuery (XML Query) is a query language and functional programming language designed to query and transform collections of structured and unstructured data, primarily in the form of XML. It also supports text data and, through implementation-sp ...

) to link miscellaneous applications, data sources and other computing assets. Most Application-Orientated Networks manipulate structured data based in a

human-readable In computing, a human-readable medium or human-readable format is any encoding of data or information that can be naturally read by humans, resulting in human-readable data. It is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than as binary da ...

format like

. Many of the operations required to mediate between applications, or to monitor their transactions, can be built into network devices that are optimized for the purpose. The rules and policies for performing these operations, also expressed in XML, are specified separately and downloaded as required. Cisco has adopted the AON acronym as the name of a family of products that function in this way.

Routing decisions

During the rise of the internet many routing decisions were made at

layer 4 In computer networking, the transport layer is a conceptual division of methods in the layered architecture of protocols in the network stack in the Internet protocol suite and the OSI model. The protocols of this layer provide end-to-end c ...

i.e. based on the

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

address and/or the port number. Application-oriented networks work at

layer 7 The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is a reference model developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that "provides a common basis for the coordination of standards development for the purpose of systems inter ...

of the

OSI stack The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model is a reference model developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that "provides a common basis for the coordination of standards development for the purpose of systems inter ...

and because they can examine the content of the message they can make routing decisions based on many different criteria including such things as the value of the purchase order or the ship date.

References

{{Reflist

External links

XML Security in Netscaler

Definition
Networking hardware Telecommunications

Routing decisions

See also

References

External links