Efficient Multi-WAN Transport for 5G with OTTER#

NSDI '25 digest Program Adjacent pick 28–30 April 2025

Authors / tier: Mary Hogan (Oberlin College); Gerry Wan (Google); Yiming Qiu (University of Michigan); Sharad Agarwal, Ryan Beckett (Microsoft); Rachee Singh (Cornell); Paramvir Bahl (Microsoft). Adjacent.

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Why: WAN interconnect is core to the PM, and multi-WAN coordination for 5G is an operator-grade problem. The paper shows a way to stitch routes across multiple WANs using existing cloud primitives.
What: OTTER coordinates transport across multiple WANs to improve performance for 5G traffic, managing route identification and use across providers from one system.
How: Uses cloud-native components (VNet peering, VPN gateways, firewalls) configured so that VMs in one region can use a gateway in another and carry transit traffic, with scale-up/scale-out per component to span large geographies without per-component code changes; supports asymmetric paths. Reported >25 Gbps between VMs in their GCP topology.
Where applicable: Multi-cloud/multi-WAN operators; the prototype leans on specific cloud networking features, so it's somewhat provider-configuration-specific.