{{unreferenced, date=September 2016
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 or message to take some sort of action.
Application-oriented networking was popularized by
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...
in response to increasing use of
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...
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, which may subseque ...
, XPath and XQuery) to link miscellaneous applications, data sources and other computing assets. Most Application-Orientated Networks manipulate structured data based in a
human-readable
A human-readable medium or human-readable format is any encoding of data or information that can be naturally read by humans.
In computing, ''human-readable'' data is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than as binary data. In most c ...
format like
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...
.
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 set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...
address and/or the port number. Application-oriented networks work at layer 7 of the
OSI stack
The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) is a conceptual model that 'provides a common basis for the coordination of SOstandards development for the purpose of systems interconnection'. In the OSI reference model, the communications ...
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.