Homa: An Efficient Topology and Route Management Approach in SD-WAN Overlays

This paper presents an efficient topology and route management approach in Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN). Traditional WANs suffer from low utilization and lack of global view of the network. Therefore, during failures, topology/service/traffic changes, or new policy requirements, the system does not always converge to the global optimal state. Using Software Defined Networking architectures in WANs provides the opportunity to design WANs with higher fault tolerance, scalability, and manageability. We exploit the correlation matrix derived from monitoring system between the virtual links to infer the underlying route topology and propose a route update approach that minimizes the total route update cost on all flows. We formulate the problem as an integer linear programming optimization problem and provide a centralized control approach that minimizes the total cost while satisfying the quality of service (QoS) on all flows. Experimental results on real network topologies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of disruption cost and average disrupted flows.