Rohde & Schwarz (R&S) announced that its DPI engine R&S PACE 2 from now supports network security as well as network analytics and traffic management solutions to diminish network issues caused by Discord.
The DPI engine OEM software solution is now able to reliably detect and classify the chat application Discord in network traffic in real time, says the Company.
Malicious activity in the communications app widely used by gamers can be identified early on in order to guarantee smooth operation. Solutions for enhancing network performance and increasing quality of experience and service can be strengthened.
Discord is a modern voice and text chat app, similar to programs such as Skype or TeamSpeak, designed specifically for gaming communities. The communication platform has seen tremendous growth over the past year with currently around 130 million registered users worldwide. The number of daily active users has increased to 19 million from 8.9 million in 2017. However, its ascent to the most popular online communication tool for gamers has resulted in adverse effects on network utilization and performance.
According to R&S, Network operators may face problems when their efforts to keep applications running fast and reliably clash with latency, congestion, packet loss and jitter. Network operators need to understand how the application and its high number of users consume bandwidth resources in order to adapt their service. They need to define traffic management policies to control application performance according to their business priorities - making sure their network services continue to meet user expectations.
Alexander Muller, Senior Product Manager, DPI at Rohde & Schwarz
Security teams need application visibility to look at patterns in the data. A deeper level of traffic inspection is important to detect unusual activity. The new Discord detection functionality enables network security solutions to distinguish legitimate use of the chat app from malicious activity.
