A new technique to increase transmission reliability over a secure SD-WAN overlay

Abstract

Communication has been the lifeline for humans since ages. However, the medium of communication and the methods kept on changing. In the new-age world, IP has been the protocol of choice for WAN communication across the world while routing and switching have been the key methods for getting the packets to their destined devices. The architectures and protocols of WAN networks has kept changing in order to adapt to growing data traffic analogues to the demand. While the IP protocol does its job of digital communication, the transmission over WAN with reliability, security and economically has become a challenge. Replacing the traditional routers with SDWAN [1] solves some of these problems by bringing the secure overlay over public network and QOS into picture but the link reliability has been a perennial problem over the public networks. The reason being no centralized control over all the smaller networks using different transport mediums, forming the vast ocean of networks called internet. The problem of packet loss and bouncing WAN [2] impacts the application performance for the end user and there is a pressing need for a solution to this problem. FEC [3] (Forward Error Correction) does have an answer to this but at a cost of bandwidth and choice of protocol. Most of the research work and implementations task about FEC being applied to UDP [4] as to avoid the load of acknowledgments and re transmissions over weak links. However, most of the applications use TCP as the protocol and the paper talks about a new method for optimizing the application performance for both TCP and UDP by using FEC on the SDWAN based secure overlay tunnels. The paper explains the experiment performed by the researcher and corelates the findings as well.