WirePlanner: Fast, Secure and Cost-Efficient Route Configuration for SD-WAN

TL;DR

WirePlanner is a novel SD-WAN solution that quickly finds cost-effective, low-latency routes and configures secure WireGuard tunnels, improving QoS and cost-efficiency over traditional IPSec-based methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new algorithm for route discovery that optimizes latency and cost, considering different payment models and ensuring secure data transmission with WireGuard.

Findings

Reduces route setup time compared to IPSec-based SD-WAN.

Optimizes routes within budget constraints while minimizing latency.

Provides secure data transmission using WireGuard.

Abstract

As enterprises increasingly migrate their applications to the cloud, the demand for secure and cost-effective Wide Area Networking (WAN) solutions for data transmission between branches and data centers grows. Among these solutions, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) has emerged as a promising approach. However, existing SD-WAN implementations largely rely on IPSec tunnels for data encryption between edge routers, resulting in drawbacks such as extended setup times and limited throughput. Additionally, the SD-WAN control plane rarely takes both latency and monetary cost into consideration when determining routes between nodes, resulting in unsatisfactory Quality of Service (QoS). We propose WirePlanner, an SD-WAN solution that employs a novel algorithm for path discovery, optimizing both latency and cost, and configures WireGuard tunnels for secure and efficient data transmission. WirePlanner considers two payment methods: Pay-As-You-Go, where users pay for a fixed amount of bandwidth over a certain duration, and Pay-For-Data-Transfer, where users pay for the volume of transmitted data. Given an underlay topology of edge routers and a user-defined budget constraint, WirePlanner identifies a path between nodes that minimizes latency and remains within the budget, while utilizing WireGuard for secure data transmission.