Bridged residential gateway operators may require the vRGW to detect if and when in-home devices are used to route access to network services, thereby acting as a nested router in the home’s LAN to hide multiple end devices behind the router MAC address. Data traffic coming from nested router devices is typically much higher than what an individual device generates or consumes. Nested routers also may violate terms of service for a BRG managed home on the operator’s network.
For a vRGW, each device in the home that is diverted to AA becomes an esm-mac AA subscriber type. When AA tethering detection is enabled, an esm-mac AA subscriber that has traffic behavior representing multi-device traffic patterns is detected by the AA process and a ‟tethering state” is placed against the AA subscriber, thereby identifying a potential nested router.
The operator can install policies to handle nested router (tethering state) devices as appropriate, including but not limited to: applying different charging, blocking, rate limiting or redirecting the traffic from the device to a web portal. Per-subscriber tethering state is an indication of devices that are operating as a nested router and can be included in the AA subscriber cflowd record export.