Traditional content delivery Internet routing and Overlay Networks are history. A couple of companies have introduced new ways to route Internet traffic based on intelligent SDN-based software, and it’s a game changer. In some cases, the software replaces traditional BGP functionality. This is a new era of Internet routing and it will accelerate over the next two years. For now, we’re going to classify these periods as Internet Routing 2.0 and 3.0.

Every vendor in the Internet Infrastructure sector with a global network will need develop similar capabilities to remain competitive. The majority of the ISP’s use traditional Internet routing to deliver traffic. Overlay Networks were developed to enhance traditional Internet routing and they worked extremely well for a while. However, now the Overlay Networks are being replaced by SDN based systems, which have a form of intelligence.

The intelligent SDN systems used big data architecture to ingest, process, analyze and route Internet traffic. In two years, these intelligent systems will be used by most Internet infrastructure companies. Here is a simple classification that illustrates the differences between the different types of routing architectures.

4 Period Classification

• Generation 1.0 Traditional Routing  – Basic routing and very manual: Majority of ISP’s
• Generation 2.0 Overlay Network – Routing decisions based on a system, which uses probes and agents to detect problematic network paths and re-routes traffic accordingly: Akamai
• Generation 3.0 Intelligent Routing – Intelligent software based on SDN and big data architecture, where network traffic is captured, processed, analyzed and routed: Google Espresso and Teridion
• Generation 4.0 Learning-base Routing – The post BGP era: i-MLRP

The two companies that have introduced intelligent SDN-based architectures are Google Espreso and Teridion. In the following days, we’re going to publish more analysis on this new segment.