Performance Evaluation of Overlay Networking for delay-sensitive services in SD-WAN

A reliable Wide Area Network (WAN) has become an imperative need for enterprises with Cloud-hosted applications and distributed branch offices. Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) has been regarded as the most promising technological solution for next generation enterprise networks capable of increasing network agility and reducing costs. In this paper, we present an experimental SD-WAN solution capable of running and optimizing delay-sensitive services, such as VoIP and video streaming, while minimizing downtime caused by network failures. We validate our solution thanks to two SD-WAN testbeds: the first one is deployed in a municipal network of an Italian city, while the other is emulated in our laboratory. The goal is to show the capability of SD-WAN of guaranteeing fast recovery and resilience in case of network failures, exploiting an innovative eBPF-based monitoring technique.