Dynamic Traffic Management for SD-WAN Inter-Cloud Communication

This article introduces the concept, implementation and evaluation of Dynamic Traffic Management (DTM). This management mechanism minimizes traffic transfer costs on interdomain links. It works for volume and 95 h percentile tariffs. DTM reacts dynamically to traffic changes on inter-domain links shifting some part of traffic (manageable traffic) from one link to another. The management mechanism works in a distributed way. It requires cooperation between operators, namely Internet Service Providers (ISPs), receiving and generating traffic. Communication between ISPs is realized by SDN controllers (inter-domain SDN). DTM has been applied to intercloud communication for Data Centers (DCs) located in different ISP domains. Moreover, it is cloud-agnostic, i.e., DTM does not engage Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) into management procedures. Evaluation performed in the testbed shows that DTM is capable of decreasing ISP costs of transit traffic up to 29%.