Abstract
Wide area network (WAN) is on the verge of another technology transformation where most of the WAN service providers are either adopting Software defined WAN (SD-WAN) or are planning to adopt it. SD-WAN integration with the existing fulfil, assurance and billing (FAB) stack of the service provider using application programmable interfaces (APIs) will be critical in SD-WAN adoption and selection of a suitable SD-WAN vendor. There are existing models to compare the SD-WAN vendors, but they overlook the APIs and do not compare the APIs provided by these vendors.
This thesis examines the existing frameworks for evaluating APIs, adapts them to define a framework for evaluating the SD-WAN vendor-provided APIs, applies the framework to two leading SD-WAN vendors’ solutions and performs a comparative analysis of their APIs from the solution integrator’s or architect’s perspective.
The framework developed in this thesis, consisting of eight different aspects of APIs that needed to be tested to compare the SD-WAN vendor’s APIs capabilities. As part of the framework, a structure is defined to score these aspects and allowing capability and flexibility to researcher to assign different weightage to each aspect based on the researcher requirements. The research conclude that the framework developed in this thesis allow solution architects to compare the vendors APIs and demonstrated the application of framework on two SD-WAN vendors.
