SDWAN - Its Impact and The Need of Time

Abstract

This paper tries to provide a justification for the need of time in "Software Defined Wide Area Networks" (SDWAN) market, for its prolonged survival. The "Software Defined Network" (SDN) concept mainly asserts to decouple data plane and control plane of a network switch. The traditional network switches were having both control plane and data plane operations performed in the same box. The SDN concept gives new paradigm for computer networks, which basically explains how data plane operation can be offloaded from switch and how it can be centralized. The SDWAN is very much similar in concept with SDN. The difference lies in how the solutions are being offered by the market. With SDWAN the critical applications' traffic can be given fixed priority in terms of packet-loss, delay, jitter in the network with pre-defined "Service Level Agreement" (SLA). This form of "Application based routing" (AAR) is the unique strength of SDWAN. This paper also brings various points from existing SDWAN solutions available in market which significantly raise concern of vendor-specific solution rather than original intention of SDWAN making vendor-free approach.