SD-WAN Lacks Cross-Fleet Learning Capabilities

The article discusses the limitations of SD-WAN technology, which has optimized decision-making within individual networks but fails to enable cross-fleet learning and sharing of insights across different SD-WAN deployments.

Details

SD-WAN technology has enabled dynamic path selection, application-aware routing, and centralized policy enforcement within individual organizations. However, these SD-WAN deployments operate in isolation, with no awareness of the shared events and resolutions happening across the broader SD-WAN ecosystem. For example, when an ISP experiences a brownout event, each SD-WAN fleet independently discovers and resolves the issue, without the ability to learn from the experiences of other fleets. Federated learning is not a suitable solution, as it operates on training timescales rather than the real-time decision-making required for SD-WAN. The article introduces the Quadratic Intelligence Swarm (QIS) protocol, which enables cross-fleet learning by having each SD-WAN fleet distill operational outcomes into compact packets, semantically fingerprint them, and route them to relevant peers for local synthesis and incorporation into their own decision-making processes. This approach allows for the sharing of insights without the need to share raw data, addressing the key limitations of current SD-WAN deployments.