Software Defined - Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) Services And Their Implementation On An Open Source Linux Based Platform

8 Chapter 1: Introduction Generally, enterprises use WAN connectivity to connect branch office to central office, or to connect datacentres separated by distance. In the past, WAN connections often use technology that require special proprietary hardware for each different type of connections and providers. In this way we had a monolith CPE model, that contrasted innovations, introducing HW and SW incompatibilities when new functions arrive, and making also difficult the network management for companies with several branch offices. This new technology, called SD-WAN that stands for Software Defined – Wide Area Network, is come out to solve many problems that affect the traditional WAN. Figure 1 - Traditional WAN and SD-WAN [1] The SD-WAN technology is born from vendors, and nowadays is adopted by the major of them. The goal is to reduce the CAPEX and OPEX for the network company through the simplification of branch office setup, supporting centralized control and network service delivery and leveraging multiple connection types on the same router to improve application performance and reliability. SD-WAN is an architecture that leverages SDN principles, and was aiming at simplify the management and operation of the networks (with a particular focus on WAN scenarios) by decoupling the networking hardware from its control programs and using software and open APIs to abstract the infrastructure and manage the connectivity and the services. At the time of research and work began of this thesis, there was no complete open source SD-WAN solutions. The only open source solution present is the one proposed by FlexiWAN [2]. With the work of this thesis we want to implement a new open source SD-WAN called EveryWAN, exploiting the new concepts of Network Slicing and