Technology - App Armor Tunnel

Our philosophy is guided by our goal to automate WAN networks so that human intervention to manage network problems is eliminated. Setting networks on autopilot requires that cognition and intelligence be designed into the SD-WAN solution so that it becomes “network aware”. Self-driving networks need the ability to observe, detect and make sense of complex network environments and need the ability to accordingly take smart actions to resolve any networking problems.

App Armor is one of our next generation SD-WAN tunnel designed to set WAN networks on autopilot. App Armor leverages three core Mushroom Networks technologies, namely flow filtering, adaptive overlay tunneling and cognitive path management.

Because of the built-in layer 7 traffic filters, the SD-WAN appliances have the ability to identify and tag each packet according to the appropriate application class. The built-in filters provide the SD-WAN appliances with the out-of-the-box ability to identify hundreds of different traffic types and tag them accordingly.

According to the application class, the App Armor tunnel will trigger the appropriate algorithms to use for that specific traffic flow. These algorithms are implemented on a per-flow class and take into account the metrics that matter most for that specific application class. App Armor is pre-loaded with the various sets of algorithms to address any traffic class.

In parallel, App Armor leverages dynamic WAN path monitoring via in-band and out-of-band probes. This rich telemetry data is used to learn the network characteristics. These network characteristics include some first-order metrics such as one-way path latencies, packet loss, delay, jitter and peak rates as well as second-order metrics that include historic telemetry data to enable App Armor to understand fine grained details of the WAN paths. Accordingly, App Armor has the ability to leverage its understanding of the network to make instantaneous smart decisions on a per-packet basis.

The above three core technologies – flow filtering, adaptive overlay tunneling and cognitive path management – combined with the built-in advanced QoS capabilities ensure the optimum performance of the Internet flows. As an example, VoIP/SIP traffic is automatically detected by the SD-WAN appliance and treated via the algorithms that optimize the MOS score, namely, packet loss, jitter and latency (the metrics that matter most for the VoIP/SIP traffic class), all without any human intervention. Similarly, video broadcasting flow can be identified via the media port so that algorithms optimum for live video streaming can be used.