Patent attributes
In a novel tunnel-less SD-WAN, when an ingress node of the SD-WAN receives a new packet flow, it identifies the path of the flow through the SD-WAN, and sends an initial prepended set of SD-WAN header values before the first packet for the flow to the next hop along this identified path, rather than encapsulating each packet of the flow with encapsulating tunnel headers that store SD-WAN next hop data for the flow. The prepended set of SD-WAN header values are then used to not only forward the first packet through the SD-WAN, but also to create records at each subsequent hop, which are then used to forward subsequent packets of the flow through the SD-WAN. Instead of identifying the entire packet flow, the first hop in the SD-WAN does not identify the entire path for the packet flow in some embodiments, but just identifies the next hop, as each subsequent hop in the SD-WAN has the task of identifying the next hop through the SD-WAN for the packet flow. Also, in some embodiments, each hop also creates records for the reverse flow in order to automatically forward reply packets along a reverse route.
