Alviu: An Intent-Based SD-WAN Orchestrator of Network Slices for Enterprise Networks

Abstract

The introduction of the Software-Defined Networking paradigm for the operation, administration and management of WAN environments, known as SD-WAN, is becoming increasingly popular due to the clear advantages that this technology provides, such as the reduction of CAPEX and OPEX related to the networking infrastructure or the flexibility provided by the development and deployment of network applications regardless of the underlying infrastructure. However, there is still a lack of solutions for enterprise networks, without carrying a substantial increase in cost, adapted to their daily reality, in which the WAN can be split in several domains, each of them possibly managed by different operators and based on different technologies and protocols. As a result, today it is not possible to have a complete solution for SD-WAN that covers all domains, reducing its scope to a single set of domains which may interact with other external domains. To address this issue, this paper presents Alviu, a SD-WAN network orchestrator based on open-source technologies that assures end-to-end network slicing to managed enterprise and academic networks thanks to a dynamic intentbased configuration of the different elements of the managed network. In addition to positioning Alviu in the current state of the art and detailing its architecture, we also evaluate Alviu’s operation in a testbed that emulates the interconnection between a set of SD-WAN domains with are also connected to other external domains based on legacy routing protocols, assessing the deployment time depending on the domains present in the complete network.