Dynamic Path Selection

Traditional WANs often rely on a single (expensive dedicated) connection like MPLS, to route all traffic. This creates a single point of failure and can lead to congestion and performance issues. SD-WAN revolutionizes this with dynamic path selection, acting as an intelligent traffic conductor that optimizes application performance across multiple links in real-time.

Imagine your network traffic as a fleet of vehicles, each carrying a different application. Instead of forcing all vehicles onto a single highway, SD-WAN provides multiple routes and intelligently directs traffic based on real-time conditions. This ensures that your critical applications always take the fastest, most efficient path, even during peak hours or network disruptions.

How Does Dynamic Path Selection Work?

SD-WAN continuously monitors the performance of all available links, measuring factors like latency, jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth utilization. Based on this real-time information, it dynamically selects the optimal path for each application, ensuring the best possible performance.

This intelligent routing is achieved through a combination of technologies:

• Application Awareness: SD-WAN identifies applications and categorizes them based on priority. For example, real time services like video conferencing or VoIP calls will be prioritized over email or web browsing.
• Real-time Monitoring: Continuous monitoring of link performance allows SD-WAN to detect congestion, latency spikes, or outages and shape traffic accordingly.
• Policy-Based Routing: Predefined policies dictate how traffic should be routed based on application, user, or destination. 
• Multiple paths to your destination: Some deployments allow the same data to be transmitted and received on multiple circuits simultaneously.  This is key to leveraging active/active circuit configurations that can afford benefits such as sub-second fail-over (a VoIP call can lose one circuit, and not drop the conversation)
• On-Demand Path Selection: SD-WAN can dynamically switch traffic to a different path in response to changing circuit impairment, network conditions or application requirements.

Connecting with Flexibility: Supported Link Types

SD-WAN offers the flexibility to leverage a variety of connection types, allowing you to tailor your network to your specific needs and budget.

• MPLS: Dedicated circuits offering guaranteed performance and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), ideal for mission-critical applications.  MPLS also offers some enhanced security due to it's switching architecture, as well as packet encapsulation.
• DIA (Dedicated Internet Access): High-bandwidth internet connections with SLAs, most carriers should offer the same price points for either MPLS or DIA.
• Broadband: Affordable and readily available best effort internet connections, suitable for small branch offices or as a backup link.
• 4G/5G Cellular: Wireless connectivity that provides redundancy and fail-over in case of primary link outages. Being able to reach the CPE in case of a cable cut is a huge advantage. Most cellular circuits are metered and hence only for fail-over in an active/inactive configuration with other circuits.
• Starlink: Satellite-based internet service that can extend connectivity to remote locations and/or provide an alternative to terrestrial connections.

By combining two or more of these different link types, SD-WAN creates a hybrid WAN that maximizes performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency. 

NOTE: It's important to know that we can migrate customer provided access (CPA) circuits to a new SD-WAN and we don't have to wait for existing WAN contract expiry.  Since we can use literally any internet circuit that provides an ethernet hand-off, we can let existing dedicated circuit contracts earn out without ETL (penalty). 

Most providers I deal with will allow the new network to be designed and deployed with CPA circuits in place, converting them as the contracts expire (for existing MPLS networks, I have the "losing" carrier simply convert each MPLS drop to DIA as we start turning up SD-WAN nodes) 

Benefits of Dynamic Path Selection

Dynamic path selection delivers significant advantages for businesses:

• Improved Application Performance: Prioritize critical applications and ensure they experience minimal latency and jitter, even during peak network usage.
• Increased Bandwidth Efficiency: Optimize the utilization of all available bandwidth by distributing traffic across multiple links.
• Enhanced User Experience: Provide seamless connectivity for employees and customers, regardless of their location or the applications they use.
• Increased Network Resilience: Eliminate single points of failure by automatically passing traffic amongst multiple circuits which allows for rerouting traffic in case of link impairment or outages.
• Reduced Costs: Leverage cost-effective asymmetrical "best effort" cable, DSL or wireless internet connections to supplement downstream needs, while maintaining high performance for critical applications with dedicated wire-line circuits if affordable.

With dynamic path selection, SD-WAN empowers businesses to build a more agile, efficient, and reliable network that adapts to their evolving needs. By intelligently managing traffic flow, SD-WAN ensures optimal application performance, enhances user experience, and unlocks the full potential of your network infrastructure.