From facilitating communication to promoting the sharing of information, wide area networks (WANs) are essential for business operations. However, the path for data to be transferred from one location to another can occasionally be obstructed, causing an interruption in service. Dynamic multipath optimization (DMPO) works to help prevent interruptions of your most critical applications.
What is Dynamic Multipath Optimization (DMPO)?
DMPO allows you to prioritize critical traffic to ensure bandwidth optimization and enhance business efficiency. As a result, critical applications can run uninterrupted, minimizing any operational downtime. It can be a little confusing to someone who isn’t an expert in Wide Area Networks. So, to make DMPO as easy to understand as possible, let’s start from the beginning and work our way up, starting with WANs.
What is a WAN?
A WAN or “Wide Area Network” is a large network of information that is not tied to a single location. The largest and most well-known WAN in the world is the internet. As mentioned earlier, WANs connect devices from multiple locations around the world, allowing you and others to communicate and share information through data packets.
These networks are established by data centers provided by service providers who lease their networks to the public. The public is able to gain access to a WAN through what are known as links or connections. A link refers to any kind of access point you use to get online like Wi-Fi, virtual private networks (VPNs), cellular networks, lines, and more.
What Role Does Dynamic Multipath Optimization Play?
SD-WAN does a great job of improving network performance through link monitoring and traffic redirection. However, this solution can be enhanced to provide your applications with a certain level of reliability.
Going back to how you connect with a WAN, there are four key factors that determine if a link is good or bad to use for data transfer. These keys are:
- Latency: This is the delay before a transfer of data begins after instruction. For example, the time it takes for a video game character to jump after you press the button.
- Throughput: The rate at which something is processed through a system.
- Packet Loss: Packet loss is something that occurs when one or more packets of data fail to reach their destination when travelling through a network.
- Jitter: The variation in the time between data packets arriving, caused by network congestion or route changes. If jitter is too high, it can lead to latency and packet loss.
These are the four things that can inhibit bandwidth and prevent an application from working as desired. This can be measured by placing a time stamp and a sequencer on data packets making their way through the network. Once the data packet is on the other side, we know how long it took for the packet to travel from point A to point B, giving us our bandwidth measurement.
Knowing how each link is performing in real-time enables application optimization routes through DMPO.
Creating Prioritization Rules
Take a moment to think about your business and how it operates. Is there something your business does online that it relies heavily on? For the sake of this example, let’s say it’s video conferencing. You absolutely cannot afford for your video feed to fail.
Now imagine the different links you’re using to access a WAN. The link you’re currently on was doing fine, but suddenly it goes completely offline. An SD-WAN would route your video conferencing data packets to a new link with better bandwidth. However, there are times when more than one link is suffering from latency, jitter, or packet loss
Rather than constantly rerouting data packets to new links, DMPO allows you to create a prioritization list. Since video conferencing is our priority in this example, DMPO would be set to maximize the performance of this application. Your DMPO service gives the SD-WAN a set of rules to follow, reserving a link specifically for video conferencing. So, when the SD-WAN identifies video conferencing data packets, only those data packets are sent to the good link.
As a result, you can be confident when using your high-priority applications, even if your organization is experiencing network performance issues.
Empower Your Business With Managed SD-WAN
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