Dynamic relay node selection and routing for cloud-native Software Defined WANs

Abstract

Cloud Native Software Defined Wide Area Networks (CN-WANs) are proposed to optimize the network performance based on the application requirement. In this paper, we propose a Relay Node Selection and Routing (RNSR) approach to minimize the number of relay nodes in CN-WANs under the end-to-end (E2E) transmission latency constraint. By doing so, we can not only ensure the Service Level Agreement (SLA) to applications, but also reduce the network operation expenses. To improve the system scalability, several algorithms are proposed for networks with different sizes. According to experiments on a prototype built on EC2 and extensive simulations in a custom in-house simulator, we demonstrate that RNSR has a superior performance on reducing the number of required relay nodes, outperforming the state-of-the-art benchmarks by up to 92.48% specifically. In addition, the algorithms designed for large scale networks will not suffer too much performance degradation but significantly improve the system scalability.