Elimination of Tunneling Technologies
As networks expanded and interconnected – both inside and outside the walls of companies around the globe – the demands of business also grew. The focus became about protecting critical business processes to control the flow of packets between endpoints, for better performance, security and reliability. Enter overlay, encapsulation and tunneling techniques such as MPLS, IPsec, VxLAN, VPN and GRE.
These technologies were developed to deliver deterministic routing, network virtualization and segmentation to IP networks but ultimately act as "workarounds." Not only are they incredibly complicated but they are also incredibly expensive. Session-based routing eliminates the need for these costly techniques because it utilizes an in-band signaling technique that recognizes the first packet of a session and controls the session based on information in that packet.
There is no application or quality of service (QoS) visibility by routers in the middle of a tunnel. For instance, if someone builds an IPsec tunnel between their enterprise and a cloud provider, the routers in the middle are blind to the traffic. When congestion occurs, packets are indiscriminately discarded. When the routing layer is session-oriented, each routing hop has visibility to the application, QoS, and security requirements, and when congestion does occur, it can dynamically and intelligently optimize the sessions.