Experimental Evaluation of SD-WAN Performance in a Municipal Network Test Bed

A reliable Wide Area Network (WAN) has become a business imperative for enterprises with Cloud-hosted applications and distributed branch offices. Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) has been regarded as the promising technological solution for next generation enterprise networks capable of increasing network agility and reducing costs. In this article, we present performance evaluation results measured in an SD-WAN test bed deployed in the municipal network of an Italian city. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of SD-WAN to increase the overall network performance by guaranteeing service availability and network protection.

I. Introduction

Over the past decade, which saw applications gradually shifting to the Cloud, the traditional enterprise Wide Area Network (WAN) architecture had to evolve to address new and more stringent requirements, such as service high availability, resiliency and security. Enterprises use WANs to connect to their remote branches and to reach Cloud services, which are provisioned by a plethora of Communication Service Providers (CSPs). As such, the rapid evolution of Enterprise networking and Information Technologies (IT) increases consistently the demand of higher capacity and higher quality WANs. CSPs are going to expand their portfolio of enterprise-focused services and, most importantly, to improve their customer products via a new emerging technology called Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) [1].