Leveraging Software-defined Exchanges for Multi-domain Orchestration of Science Network Resources

Joaquin Chung Miranda
Seminar

To interconnect research facilities across wide geographic areas, network operators deploy science networks, also referred to as Research and Education (R&E) networks. These networks allow experimenters to establish dedicated circuits between research facilities for transferring large amounts of data, by using advanced reservation systems. International dedicated circuits typically require coordination between multiple administrative domains, which need to reach an agreement on a suitable advance reservation. Network operators may take from days to several weeks f or planning and provisioning a multi-domain circuit. Another challenge is that advance reservations terminate at the WAN border router of each domain, and a data transfer has to compete with campus LAN traffic to reach the advanced reservation at the WAN border router of the research facility. To enhance provisioning capabilities of multi-domain advance reservations, we propose an architecture for end-to-end service orchestration in multi-domain science networks that leverages software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined exchanges (SDX) for providing multi-path, multi-domain advance reservations. Our simulations show our orchestration architecture increases the reservation success rate. We evaluate our solution using GridFTP, one of the most popular tools for data transfers in the scientific community. To strongly bind an end-to-end flow to the user or application that requested an advance reservation, we propose an architecture for advance reservation access contr ol using SDN and tokens.