Cisco WAN Automation Engine (WAE)

Optimize and Automate the WAN

The WAN Automation Engine is a powerful, flexible software-defined networking (SDN) platform. It abstracts and simplifies your WAN environment while making it fully open and programmable. You can deploy innovative services such as Coordinated Maintenance, bandwidth calendaring, and premium network-routing solutions.

Features and Capabilities

Customers can incrementally invest in the solution's capabilities.

The foundation software is Cisco WAE Planning, which provides a cross-sectional view of traffic, topology, and equipment state. It takes advantage of a predictive model that performs "what if" analyses of failure impacts. WAE Planning evolved from the Cisco MATE software suite, which has been used in service provider networks for more than 10 years.

Cisco WAE Automation builds on top of WAE Planning. It combines smart data collection, modeling, and predictive analytics into an extensible API-based configuration platform.

Use Cases

You can now automate time-intensive manual operations in service provider networks with the WAN Automation Engine. Tasks that can be automated include managing, controlling, analyzing, and improving network performance and capacity planning. Here are some potential use cases.

Demand-Admission Requests

Service providers can intelligently consider content location as well as network impact using the WAN Automation Engine when placing the demand. At the same time, you can help ensure that the network stays healthy.

Coordinated Maintenance

Coordinated Maintenance is a WAN Automation Engine application. It aims to simplify, automate, and ultimately improve the way customers approach change management in the WAN. The application:

• Reduces uncertainty about the impact of network changes
• Intelligently guides the operator to perform multiple maintenances at optimal times
• Allows geographically and functionally disparate teams to communicate more effectively about network changes
• Automates and streamlines aspects of network maintenance that are sensitive to operator error
• Uses the engine's optimization and prediction capabilities to reduce network impact

Load-Balancing Label-Switched Paths

It's important for service providers to efficiently use expensive resources, such as high-cost or transoceanic links. The WAN Automation Engine helps ensure that the most expensive network resources are fully optimized, assigning best load-share metrics using the Path Computation Element Communication Protocol (PCEP).

Application Engineered Routing

The Application Engineered Routing solution provides end-to-end control over how the network infrastructure transports applications. Combining segment routing with the WAN Automation Engine provides the necessary intelligence to optimize network resources and make informed decisions dynamically. This intelligence helps you deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience.

Additional Resources