Juniper Session Smart Router

The Session Smart™ Router powers Juniper’s SD-WAN solution that’s designed to connect users with exceptional experiences. Built on an application-aware and zero-trust secure network fabric, it meets the most stringent enterprise performance, security, and availability requirements.

The router overcomes inherent inefficiencies of conventional solutions with a tunnel-free architecture that enables improved performance, fast deployments, and cost savings. The software solution can run on customer premises equipment (CPE), on data center network servers, and in the cloud for flexible deployments. It is centrally manageable using the AI-driven Juniper Mist™ cloud or the Juniper Session Smart Conductor platform.

Key Features


  • Application-aware routing
  • Fail-safe service delivery
  • Orchestration and automation
  • Zero trust security
  • Centralized management using the Juniper Mist Cloud or Session Smart Conductor

Features + Benefits

Application-Aware for Optimized Experiences

Application awareness supports load balancing and traffic steering based on session policies and network status, ensuring optimal performance for critical applications. The Session Smart Router is the only product in the industry with a network routing fabric expressly designed to connect users with exceptional experiences, not merely connect devices.

Visibility and Insights

The session-based routing solution delivers richer and more granular insights than packet-based solutions. With Juniper Mist WAN Assurance, powered by Mist AI™, these insights provide unparalleled visibility into user experiences, anomalies, and root cause issues.  

Centralized Cloud Management

The Mist AI cloud simplifies deployment and management with zero touch provisioning (ZTP), templating tools, full stack visibility, and AI insights and automation.

Zero Trust Security

The Session Smart Router is the only routing solution with inherent zero trust access control, directionality, and segmentation policy, all powered by secure vector routing. IDS/IPS and URL filtering add additional security.  

Scale and Speed

The Session Smart Routing fabric rapidly scales to thousands of sites while accelerating service deployment through centralized orchestration of global policies. True zero touch provisioning (ZTP) and automated templating tools enable deployments in minutes rather than days.

Breakthrough Economics

A tunnel-less architecture enables up to 30–50 percent reduction in bandwidth, reducing costs and improving application performance.

A Magic Quadrant Visionary

Gartner positions Juniper Networks as a Visionary in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SD-WAN.

Get the report

Resource Center

Practical Resources

Technical Documentation

CASE STUDY

Seagate to Leverage Juniper Networks' AI-driven Enterprise Solutions

Seagate Technology® has selected Juniper’s full stack AI-driven enterprise portfolio to support its evolving business needs. The Juniper solution, driven by Mist AI and the cloud, offers Seagate proactive automation and unique client-to-cloud insight, as well as optimized performance and cost savings in key areas of their IT infrastructure.

Seagate, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions, has multiple sites in 18 countries that share a vast amount of data. As a way of decreasing network costs and optimizing the performance of key applications between these locations, Seagate is moving from a traditional MPLS network to Juniper’s AI-driven SD-WAN solution. Juniper’s unique tunnel-less SD-WAN architecture can help reduce Seagate’s telco and hosting costs, which is ideal for high bandwidth activities like data transfers.

Seagate Hero

Related Solutions

AI-Driven SD-WAN

Enrich user experiences across the WAN with AI-driven insight, automation, action, and native security.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

Juniper SASE secures the workforce with effective security that follows users wherever they go and an AI-optimized network experience. Juniper meets you where you are and takes you where you want to go without breaking the bank or your ops team.

Managed SD-WAN

Juniper SD-WAN is an integral part of a unique, secure client-to-cloud networking approach designed to provide the best operational experience for operators, as well as the best network and application experience for enterprise customers. It leverages AI and the Juniper Mist Cloud Architecture for proactive insights and automation that take the complexity out of network operations and support.

The Case for AI in SD-WAN

Learn why an AI-Driven SD-WAN is a logical and necessary next step for any modern IT infrastructure.

Why Goodput Matters

Goodput is a measure of the rate of useful data passed over the network. Read about why goodput is important for your SD-WAN.
Demand more from your network
See what industry-leading AI and ML can do for you.

Juniper Session Smart Router FAQs

What is the Session Smart Router?

The Juniper Session Smart Router is a software-based router that enables tunnel-free, application-aware and zero-trust secure networks. The Session Smart Router is agile and resilient and provides cost-effective and efficient WAN connectivity. Together, the Session Smart Router and Mist AI power Juniper’s AI-driven SD-WAN solution.

What are the benefits of Session Smart Routing?

Session Smart Routing improves end user and IT user experiences by simplifying operations and improving application performance. Inherent zero trust policies and a tunnel-free architecture enable strong security without sacrificing performance. Session Smart Routers also collect rich telemetry on network traffic, which, when combined with an AI engine, provide actionable insights into user-experience and possible network issues. See Juniper Mist WAN Assurance to learn more.  

What are the limitations of tunneling protocols like IPsec?

Tunneling protocols like IPsec add about 30 percent additional bandwidth per packet sent, which reduces available network capacity and slows application performance. (We refer to this wasted overhead as “badput.”) Additionally, setting up tunnels between every site in a network is time-consuming, error-prone, and scale-limiting.

What are the benefits of tunnel-free routing?

Unlike tunnel-based routing, tunnel-free routing does not add additional bandwidth to network traffic, enabling improved application performance and costs savings. Furthermore, tunnel-free architectures are flexible and highly scalable, enabling faster deployments at any scale.

What security features does the Session Smart Router have?

Juniper’s tunnel-free Session Smart Routing is inherently zero-trust secure with deny-by-default access policies. Session Smart Routing has built-in firewall functionality, such as intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) and URL filtering. It is also FIPS 140-2 certified and PCI and HIPAA compliant.

What are the deployment options for the Session Smart Router?

The Session Smart Router is software-based and deployable on Juniper SSR Series Routers Hardware, white-box customer premises equipment, data center network servers, and all major public clouds. See the Session Smart Router Datasheet to learn more.

Who should use the Juniper Session Smart Router?

Small- and medium-sized business, enterprises, telecommunications providers, and managed service provides looking to modernize their network and improve IT and end-user experiences should all consider using the Juniper Session Smart Router.

What are the use cases for the Session Smart Router?

The Session Smart Router supports several use cases, such as:

  • Improving network security and performance through a router refresh or SD-WAN deployment 
  • Speeding cloud migration initiatives 
  • Reducing cloud connectivity costs

Where can I get help with the Session Smart Router?

For help with the Session Smart Router, view our Session Smart Router Documentation, take a training course, or join our SD-WAN Community. We also offer deployment services. Read the SD-WAN Deployment Services Datasheet for deployment information.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN Infrastructure, by Jon Forest, Andrew Lerner, Evan Zeng and Naresh Singh, [Publish Date September 12, 2022].

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.