Demonstration of dynamic Bandwidth on Demand at TNC2013

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.© JIVE / NEXPReS

Last week at the TERENA Networking Conference 2013 in Maastricht, Paul Boven (JIVE), Radek Krzywania (Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre) and Tangui Coulouarn (Technical University of Denmark) gave several demonstrations of practical use of dynamic, on-demand circuit creation across European NRENs for the purpose of transferring radioastronomy observation data. These demos showed the creation of multiple international cross-domain paths from the radio-telescopes at Torun and Jordell Bank.

The high bandwidth generated by e-VLBI observations is best transported over dedicated connections. Currently, static (always-on) lightpaths are in use for e-VLBI, even when no observation is running. The Bandwidth-on-Demand service over international distances would allow for a more efficient and flexible network usage for e-VLBI.

The NSI protocol is a new standard developed in the OGF, that allows the creation of such international paths, regardless of heterogeneous environment constraints (e.g. different transport technologies, incompatible provisioning tools). NSI has been adopted by the GÉANT BoD service and multiple European NRENs. Network domains involved in the demonstration are using different network provisioning tools (e.g. OpenDRAC, AutoBAHN) with NSI interfaces attached, enabling inter-domain communication and the automated creation of international lightpaths upon request from the end-user.

The demos not only presented the creation of circuit, but gave a background on how NRENs and end-users are able to collaborate and integrate various services (e.g. provisioning, monitoring, topology information exchange) in automated manner, delivering resources for scientific community in a fast, yet reliable way. During the demos, we presented the advantage of dynamic provisioning over statically configured circuits.