PathBlazer: 5G transport orchestration on the Azure WAN

Established: January 1, 2018

We are building networking & distributed systems technology to support 5G traffic on the Azure global Wide Area Network. The 5G specification defines multiple classes of service, e.g. URLLC, eMBB and eMTC/mMTC, each with their own latency and throughput requirements. Pathblazer aims to map 5G flows to to paths most appropriate for their requirements, while optimizing the Azure WAN usage as well as COGS for operators. We aim to leverage network telemetry, coupled with continuous and on-demand network measurements to to perform fine-grained re-routing of flows in real-time, in response to changing network conditions. We have multiple efforts underway to realize this vision, including:

  • Multiple traffic engineering systems that compute optimal routes in real-time.
  • We are building an engine to specify and verify the correctness of network configuration.
  • A system that predicts the likelihood of traffic ingressing along every peering connection across the Azure WAN