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July 12, 2023

How MPTCP and SD-WAN Help Enterprises Meet Bandwidth Demands

The overshadowing of COVID-19 continues with organisations adopting the work-from-anywhere model to keep their business afloat even during emergencies. Connecting branches and remote offices is a significant challenge, and network solutions like MPTCP and SD-WAN are delivering agile and reliable solutions to connect to the last mile in social distancing. Embracing digitalisation helps improve the workforce and customer experience for quick delivery of products and services.

The requirement for a flexible and secure connection is the need of the day, and organisations are moving network transformation to the top of their list. Solutions like MPTCP and SD-WAN can address your bandwidth needs by improving performance.

First, let us see how SD-WAN delivers enterprise bandwidth demands:

1. Delivers enriching end-user experience: The application-aware routing and policies are better when compared to MPLS, broadband and other dedicated internet services. It selects the best path for prescribed applications by prioritising critical applications on higher bandwidth to ensure no network interruption. SD-WAN is a cost-effective solution for access technologies even as your business expands and branch traffic volume increases.
2. Efficient bandwidth usage: With growing feature-oriented applications and rich content, enterprises are moving towards cost-effective means to increase bandwidth, like SaaS and IaaS hosting, for a better user experience. SD-WAN assists in load-balancing traffic through various links. It also increases the bandwidth requirement of the users, meaning valuable data can be retrieved from secondary failover connections, thereby preventing the need for regular bandwidth upgrades.
3. Improved security: When information is shared over the public internet, enhancing security for critical data becomes crucial. SD-WAN provides strong encryption techniques to provide access control for WAN traffic and delivers reliable internet for common enterprise applications. The centralised policy, SD-WAN, can implement security policies across sites automatically. Today SD-WAN solutions are integrated with Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architectures. It provides remote access, identity-based control and enterprise networking for easy management of access priorities.
4. Agility, visibility and control: SD-WAN offers centralised automation facilitating quicker reconfiguration of network devices. Moreover, centralised management facilitates greater visibility, bandwidth usage, and device and network performance. It helps in faster deployment, matching devices with network technologies such as mobile or broadband.

Multipath TCP meeting bandwidth demands
As the name suggests, MPTCP opens up multiple paths to increase bandwidth and re-bounce from failures. MPTCP facilitates the transportation of operations across various paths at the same time. In the case of TCP socket, the causes of failure for a user who is browsing and accessing the server where a website is hosted are listed below:

  • A firewall can terminate the connection.
  • There is a possibility of the connection slowing down along the path of the packets.
  • The server and the client access the network interface to communicate; when there is a failure, the TCP connections cannot be used.

Such network failures can be overcome by using MPTCP. An MPTCP socket is established between the server and the client instead of a TCP socket. By doing so, extra MPTCP sub-flows are created. In other words, it is a separate channel created for communication when there is a failure. It uses alternative resources, routes and media. Even if one sub-flow is stable, the communication network remains active. MPTCP is used to aggregate connections to increase resilience caused due to network issues or combine network throughput. With normal TCP channels failing, MPTCP was developed as an option to bundle bandwidth.

SD-WAN integrates various technologies to enhance the network experience. With SD-WAN and MPTCP, potential pitfalls can be identified and removed, delivering seamless connectivity to smooth your business journey.

SMOAD SD-WAN offers customised SD-WAN solutions to protect your business from bandwidth challenges.

Call us for a demo!