Software Definded - Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) Services and their Implementation on an Open Source Linux Based Platform

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Computer Science - Internet, New Technologies, grade: 110 cum laude, University of Rome 'Tor Vergata', language: English, abstract: With this thesis work we are going to provide initially an overview about Software Defined- Wide are network technology, relying on vendors products and the MEF standard. Next we will implement a new Open Source SD-WAN solution, exploiting the new concepts of Network Slicing and Overlays. In our SD-WAN the different types of service are segmented through virtual independent Overlay networks, that abstract the underlying network. In so doing we want to facilitate the use of multiple WAN connections and the assignment of different QoS and security for different services. We start form an SDN solution that was extended to an SD-WAN which implements multiple Overlays to create End-to-End Slices among multiple sites. The work has focused on design the high-level open source SD-WAN architecture, design and implement the vCPE (Edge router) able to support ZTP (Zero Touch Provisioning), design and implement the SD-WAN Controller/Orchestrator that is able to control and program the vCPEs and deploy services. The services are based on L3 tunnels that interconnects multiple customer sites transporting traffic of a specific applications. The Controller was developed based on SDN and NFV principles and made it capable to automate and orchestrate e2e services giving to the users to control their sites. The SD-WAN solution is based completely on Linux platform and in the implementation we assume that there is an IaaS that provides the computing workloads. The final part of the work consists in implement an emulated geographical network (in Mininet) in which deploy and test the solution and related network service.