| CPC H04L 47/125 (2013.01) [H04L 45/121 (2013.01); H04L 45/24 (2013.01); H04L 47/122 (2013.01); H04W 8/04 (2013.01)] | 21 Claims |

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1. A method of providing network-aware load balancing for data messages traversing a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) comprising a plurality of connection links between different elements of the SD-WAN, the method comprising:
at a load balancer,
receiving link state data relating to a set of SD-WAN datapaths comprising a set of connection links in the plurality of connection links, wherein the load balancer provides load balancing for a set of destination machines connected to the load balancer over the set of SD-WAN datapaths;
receiving a data message from a device connected to the SD-WAN destined to a destination machine in the set of destination machines;
selecting, for the data message, a particular destination machine in the set of destination machines by performing a load balancing operation based on the received link state data, the link state data comprising attributes of different types of physical links; and
forwarding the data message to the selected particular destination machine in the set of destination machines.
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