NetCloud: SD-WAN Network Traffic Control

WAN Link Diversity

Cellular wireless has become a common WAN link due to the increasing amount of bandwidth supported with 4G, Gigabit-Class LTE, and 5G,and because of its ability to reach hard-to-link areas and accelerate time to service Cellular broadband has historically served as a failover WAN, providing link diversity. However, increasingly it is being leveraged as a primary link or to providing bandwidth augmentation for existing connections.

Regardless of the use case, SD-WAN is an integral part of a well-functioning Wireless WAN to enhance application performance and reliability. But not every SD-WAN solution accommodates the unique needs of cellular wireless like Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Exchange SD-WAN. This solution provides critical adaptations to traditional SD-WAN technology so that it performs effectively across 5G WANs. These adaptations include:

Optimization of traffic across LTE, 5G nonstandalone networks, 5G standalone network slices, wired connections, and Wi-Fi as WAN connections.
Consideration of cellular attributes such as available bandwidth and data usage when steering traffic
Integration of Cellular Intelligence to provide better insights and visibility of the LTE/5G network.
For NetCloud Exchange specifically, preservation of bandwidth by using inline traffic to measure WAN performance

Application Quality of Experience

Use NetCloud Manager to set up application-based policies, whether you are deploying SD-WAN at the edge only or end to end with NetCloud Exchange.

With NetCloud Exchange, more than 3,500 applications can be recognized and classified. Policies to steer certain applications to specific cellular service providers, WAN interfaces or groups of WAN interfaces can be set up quickly and easily and applied across the entire SD-WAN network with ease.

With Cradlepoint branch routers, more than 1,000 applications can be recognized and classified. Policies to steer certain applications to specific WAN interfaces or groups of WAN interfaces can be set up quickly and easily and applied to a specific device or to a device group with ease.

WAN Selection

Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Exchange solution and branch routers intelligently assess the health of each WAN link and its ability to run applications. IT teams can set traffic and failover policies based on high-level business intent, then rely on the routers to detect an outage or a deteriorated link and automatically failover.

Optimize Cellular Usage

Cradlepoint SD-WAN solutions offer capabilities to specifically optimize cellular links and protect customers’ data plans. This includes special insight into cellular WAN usage across each cellular provider both at an account level and an individual router or modem level. Administrators can also drill into what clients and what applications are driving data usage and then put policies into place to block non business-critical applications at certain sites or steer traffic away from links that are approaching a predefined data usage threshold (for example, 75% of their allotted data plan)