Bandwidth on Demand with AutoBAHN
The Bandwidth on Demand research activity has made great strides over the lifetime of the GÉANT2 project. During Year 3, the activity has achieved a successful demonstration of the dynamic provision of a dedicated circuit, using the AutoBAHN (Automated Bandwidth Allocation across Heterogeneous Networks) architecture developed by the activity.
The AutoBAHN service architecture has been tailored to the needs of the multi-domain, multi-technology pan-European research and education community. It is capable of setting up on demand dedicated circuits, spanning multiple countries and multiple networks, administered by different entities and using different technologies.
AutoBAHN makes it possible for network users to request their own bandwidth, explicitly defining the destination of their data, and the speed and service quality level to be used during transmission. In the demonstration, which took place in Cambridge in June 2007, two workstations located in the Irish and Greek research networks (HEAnet and GRnet) were connected over the GÉANT2 testbed with a dedicated gigabit Ethernet circuit, provisioned within minutes.
The service can be offered on demand (subject to the availability of resources). AutoBAHN’s unique service approach demonstrates the project’s user-led ethos, focusing on end-user control and well-designed, simple, web-based user interfaces. It does so regardless of the network technologies in use by the network domains across which the circuit is established.
The first release of the AutoBAHN inter-domain manager (IDM) includes:
- fully functional inter-domain pathfinding
- a resilient distributed reservations mechanism
- domain manager (DM) functionality
- an IDM-DM interface
- a DM interface to technology proxy, allowing the user to check availability, book resources and release resources
One AutoBAHN system instance is operated in each domain involved in any given circuit. This makes possible distributed resource availability checking and reservation, as well as automated topology updates.
The successful demonstration of the AutoBAHN system is another excellent example of GÉANT2’s innovative approach to service provision with the end user in mind.
