Hybrid SD-WAN for sites and vehicles

Call it reinvention or evolution, but the IT and telecommunications industry is a constant source of new or improved innovations. Let’s consider SD-WAN: since it hit the market over a decade ago, SD-WAN has offered many enterprise benefits, including financial savings from low-cost links, in-depth visibility into end-to-end performance, and the ability to apply granular traffic policies and controls. However, the main drawcard of SD-WAN technology is its ability to ensure 24/7 business continuity while improving WAN and application quality of experience (QoE). It keeps networks and application data moving without interruption. It does this using:

• Traffic steering features that match each application to the appropriate WAN interface based on performance criteria.
• Link bonding and active/active traffic handling to solve for insufficient link capacity and unexpected congestion.
• Forward error correction (FEC) to prevent application retries when connections are experiencing high levels of loss.
   

The combination of SD-WAN and 5G creates a hybrid SD-WAN solution that facilitates even better network performance and flexibility across hybrid WAN environments.

Hybrid WAN

Hybrid WAN, also known as multi-WAN, typically involves using multiple types of connections, such as wired broadband, cellular, and even satellite, combined in a single network architecture. As part of the hybrid WAN, intelligent bonding combines multiple WAN connections — wired, cellular, satellite, or Wi-Fi-as-WAN — into a single virtual connection to improve network performance, efficiency, and resilience.

The hybrid WAN allows organisations to achieve network redundancy, load balancing, and improved network performance by leveraging different types of connections for applications or locations.

Why is having SD-WAN in hybrid environments important?

SD-WAN solutions provide the agility, flexibility, and control necessary to optimise WAN performance, ensure reliability, and simplify management across diverse WAN environments, making it an essential component of modern enterprise networking strategies. It does so by allowing network administrators to prioritise network traffic to match the needs of the business through WAN optimisation, traffic handling, and intelligent link bonding.

SD-WAN provides a number of key benefits.

Improved resiliency and uptime

Not only does SD-WAN significantly improve uptime by allowing enterprises to easily load-balance between multiple WAN links, but it also provides better resiliency in the event of a link failure by automatically rerouting traffic to alternate, operational paths, ensuring uninterrupted connectivity.

SD-WAN is adopted to maximise throughput and optimise application performance, which was previously accomplished through techniques such as active/active traffic handling, compression, and more. Today, enterprise networks can harness a zero-loss WAN connection for business-critical applications through intelligent bonding and FEC.

FEC enhances quality of experience during periods of high loss. To do this, the transmitter sends redundant data bits in the bitstream to safeguard against loss or corruption.

Better quality of experience for applications

An SD-WAN router can steer different applications to specific WAN links based on priority, use case, and the cloud-managed policies put into place by the IT team for better quality of experience. It can also help businesses optimise connectivity to cloud-based applications.

Network slicing

Consider network slicing to better understand how cellular and SD-WAN solutions can work together to improve network performance. This essential capability of 5G standalone infrastructure can partition radio spectrum into virtual slices based on use cases and application types. This enables the support of differentiated services across a single 5G connection and facilitates the deterministic transport of business-critical applications across 5G networks that service-level agreements can back. Network slices can be customised and divided based on unique bandwidth, signal strength, jitter, and latency needs. SD-WAN provides the intelligence to recognise, classify, and create policies to steer the applications to their appropriate network slice.

Increased bandwidth

SD-WAN helps increase bandwidth by aggregating multiple WAN connections, selecting optimal paths, and intelligently steering traffic across available links. Through features like load balancing and WAN link bonding, SD-WAN maximises bandwidth and reduces congestion, enabling organisations to meet the growing demands of modern applications and users.

Enhancing connectivity for vehicles

Providing high availability across diverse WAN connections and service providers, SD-WAN has traditionally been limited to stationary sites. Today however, the benefits of SD-WAN are available to vehicles, which are now basically ‘offices on wheels’, providing reliable and resilient connectivity on the move.

Network administrators and fleet managers can address mobility challenges and satisfy vehicle bandwidth demands by installing ruggedised dual-modem routers. These devices facilitate automatic, application-based traffic steering between carriers based on signal strength, latency, jitter, and data usage. If performance degrades beyond the pre-defined thresholds, traffic is dynamically steered to a better performing connection. As fleet technologies become more complex, using 5G SD-WAN in vehicles will become more common, particularly when coupled with WAN bonding features such as flow duplication and bandwidth aggregation. These features ensure mission-critical traffic gets through by duplicating the traffic across two WAN connections simultaneously and can deliver higher throughput for video uploads by aggregating bandwidth from multiple WAN connections.

As 5G continues its widespread adoption and enterprises rely less on wired connectivity, the need for flexible, resilient, and high-performing hybrid WAN and SD-WAN options will only intensify. Compared to traditional connectivity options, 5G provides much more scalability to allow enterprises to expand. It also adds another flexible type of connectivity to SD-WAN’s existing capabilities by enabling reliable WAN diversity with ultra-low latency and increased bandwidth.

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