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Experimental Evaluation of SD-WAN Performance in a Municipal Network Test Bed
... With the ever-increasing demand for network resources and the emergence of data-intensive applications, efficient load balancing becomes paramount to ensure optimal performance and user experience in CANs. To address these challenges, load balancing techniques are employed to distribute workloads across the network or servers to prevent system overload and ensure efficient and expeditious handling of all requests [4]- [7]. By uniformly distributing network traffic, this enables you to avoid resource failure brought on by resource overload [8]- [10]. ...
Efficient load balancing is crucial for optimizing network performance and ensuring seamless connectivity in modern campus area networks (CANs). With the proliferation of data-intensive applications and the increasing reliance on cloud-based services, organizations are seeking effective load-balancing solutions to distribute network traffic evenly across available resources. The continuous improvement of devices, tools, and techniques to cater a large amount of network traffic, started to be employed on different campuses. Understanding the best approach to maximize the utilization of the network resources is crucial in order to stabilize and maintain the network. The study aims to discern the round-robin and software defined-wide area network (SD-WAN) techniques based on defined metrics and conducted with a predefined payload for commonly used application conditions. The analysis shows that SD-WAN delivers a much superior performance than round-robin based on the criteria. The local area network (LAN) test shows difference between the two types of technology for the three given metrics. The WAN test shows that the round-robin has higher packet loss, latency, and jitter than the SD-WAN technology. While round-robin may suffice for small-scale deployments with relatively homogeneous traffic patterns, SD-WAN offers more sophisticated capabilities for larger CANs with diverse application workloads and distributed locations.
We present SWAN, a system that boosts the utilization of inter-datacenter networks by centrally controlling when and how much traffic each service sends and frequently re-configuring the network's data plane to match current traffic demand. But done simplistically, these re-configurations can also cause severe, transient congestion because different switches may apply updates at different times. We develop a novel technique that leverages a small amount of scratch capacity on links to apply updates in a provably congestion-free manner, without making any assumptions about the order and timing of updates at individual switches. Further, to scale to large networks in the face of limited forwarding table capacity, SWAN greedily selects a small set of entries that can best satisfy current demand. It updates this set without disrupting traffic by leveraging a small amount of scratch capacity in forwarding tables. Experiments using a testbed prototype and data-driven simulations of two production networks show that SWAN carries 60% more traffic than the current practice.
We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of B4, a private WAN connecting Google's data centers across the planet. B4 has a number of unique characteristics: i) massive bandwidth requirements deployed to a modest number of sites, ii) elastic traffic demand that seeks to maximize average bandwidth, and iii) full control over the edge servers and network, which enables rate limiting and demand measurement at the edge.
These characteristics led to a Software Defined Networking architecture using OpenFlow to control relatively simple switches built from merchant silicon. B4's centralized traffic engineering service drives links to near 100% utilization, while splitting application flows among multiple paths to balance capacity against application priority/demands. We describe experience with three years of B4 production deployment, lessons learned, and areas for future work.
With the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), lower costs and increased efficiency are the promised payoffs.1,2 But what about security concerns? Does this additional route into corporate systems open up new vulnerabilities and create fresh opportunities for attackers?
With software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs), lower costs and increased efficiency are the promised payoffs. But what about security concerns?
Does this additional route into corporate systems open up new vulnerabilities and create fresh opportunities for attackers? While SD-WAN often routes traffic over the Internet, the underlying technologies are hardened, armoured and fully protected. And cloud-delivered SD-WAN platforms that offer integration with the industry's leading security platforms, enterprise IT and security staff can ensure that corporate data is protected and compliance regulations are met, explains Michael Wood of VeloCloud Networks.
In spite of their commercial success, Cloud services are still subject to two major weak points: data security and infrastructure resiliency. In this paper, we propose an original Cloud network architecture aiming at improving the resiliency of Cloud network infrastructures interconnecting remote datacenters. The main originality of this architecture consists in exploiting the principles of Software Defined Networking (SDN) in order to adapt the rerouting strategies in case of network failure according to a set of requirements. In existing Cloud networks configurations, network recovery after a fiber cut is achieved by means of the usage of redundant bandwidth capacity preplanned through backup links. Such an approach has two drawbacks. First, it induces at a large scale a non-negligible additional cost for the Cloud Service Providers (CSP). Second, the pre-computation of the rerouting strategy may not be suited to the specific quality of service requirements of the various data flows that were transiting on the failing link. To prevent these two drawbacks, we propose that CSPs deploy their services in several redundant datacenters and make sure that those datacenters are properly interconnected via the Internet. For that purpose, we propose that a CSP may use the services of multiple (typically two) Internet Service Providers to interconnect its datacenters via the Internet. In practice, we propose that a set of 'routing inflection points' may form an overlay network exploiting a specific routing strategy. We propose that this overlay is coordinated by a Software Defined Networking-based centralized controller. Thus, such a CSP may choose the network path between two datacenters the most suited to the underlying traffic QoS requirement. The proposed approach enables this CSP a certain independency from its network providers. In this paper, we present this new Cloud architecture. We outline how our approach mixes concepts taken from both SDN and Segment Routing. Unlike the protection techniques used by existing CSPs, we explain how this approach can be used to implement fast rerouting strategy for inter-datacenter data exchanges.
One major question facing operators everywhere is how to be sure that everything goes fine as well as how black holes can be detected in their networks? Passive network monitoring is very suitable for this purpose. It can be used for searching problems of a single network device, a major problem affecting the whole LAN or core network. Passive network monitoring, however, is not just for problem solving, it can also be used for creating network statistics or for measuring network performance. As will be seen in this survey, it is a very powerful tool in everyday network life. Delay or packet loss can be measured with either passive or active means. In this survey, the focus is on both passive and active measurements. The goal of this survey is to introduce the reader to passive and active measurements in data networks.
We present our experiences to date building ONOS (Open Network Operating System), an experimental distributed SDN control platform motivated by the performance, scalability, and availability requirements of large operator networks. We describe and evaluate two ONOS prototypes. The first version implemented core features: a distributed, but logically centralized, global network view; scale-out; and fault tolerance. The second version focused on improving performance. Based on experience with these prototypes, we identify additional steps that will be required for ONOS to support use cases such as core network traffic engineering and scheduling, and to become a usable open source, distributed network OS platform that the SDN community can build upon.
In the OpenFlow framework, packet forwarding (data plane) and routing decisions (control plane) run on different devices. OpenFlow switches are in charge of packet forwarding, whereas a controller runs applications which decide how the packet should be handled. OpenFlow standardizes this control protocol, leaving the space for any controller implementation. In this paper we present how we developed a traffic engineering application in a multi-WAN use case with a software development approach.
Internet workload is a mix of many and complex sources. Therefore, its accurate and realistic replication is a difficult and challenging task. Such difficulties are exacerbated by the multidimensional heterogeneity and scale of the current Internet combined with its constant evolution. The study and generation of network workload is a moving target, both in terms of actors (devices, access networks, protocols, applications, services) and in terms of case studies (the interest expands from performance analysis to topics like network neutrality and security). In order to keep up with the new questions that arise and with the consequent new technical challenges, networking research needs to continuously update its tools. In this paper, we describe the main properties that a network workload generator should have today, and we present a tool for the generation of realistic network workload that can be used for the study of emerging networking scenarios. In particular, we discuss (i) how it tackles the main issues challenging the representative replication of network workload, and (ii) our design choices and its advanced features that make it suitable to analyze complex and emerging network scenarios. To highlight how our tool advances the state-of-the-art, we finally report some experimental results related to the study of hot topics like (a) broadband Internet performance and network neutrality violations; (b) RFC-based security and performance assessment of home network devices; (c) performance analysis of multimedia communications.
Cisco Networking Academy: Connecting Networks Companion Guide
- R Graziani
- B Vachon
The Journey to Telco SD-WAN Managed Services
- Abdo