SD-WAN: An Open-Source Implementation for Enterprise Networking Services

A reliable Wide Area Network (WAN) has become a necessity for businesses enterprises to transmit critical data between multiple branches and to increase their revenues. Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is an emerging paradigm that introduces the advantages of Software Defined Networking (SDN) into Enterprise Networking (EN). SD-WAN can support differentiated services over public WAN by dynamically changing the flow forwarding rules over an overlay network based on monitoring data and service requirements. This paper proposes an early implementation of SD-WAN based on open source components, such as OpenDaylight as SDN_controller, OpenvSwitch (OvS) and a set of services for network monitoring and policy-based path selection. We present a demo-test in a simple emulated but realistic network environment, showing new features and advantages for the enterprise in terms of resource optimization.