About AutoBAHN

The AutoBAHN system does not act as a replacement for existing control plane, signalling and provisioning capabilities. Instead it provides an integrated business layer for co-ordinated inter-domain provisioning, complementing existing control plane capabilities (where they exist) with Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI), inter-domain routing functionality, inter-domain monitoring, and so on. It also substitutes for the control plane functions where those are not available. AutoBAHN, acting as the intermediary between users (or applications) and the network, interprets user requests and translates them to requests to the network. The network itself must specify to the middleware what services are available and their corresponding quality parameters.

The AutoBAHN system has been designed to allocate network bandwidth to users/applications both immediately and in advance. Networking resources in the form of dynamic circuits are allocated, end to end, across multiple domains, creating a complex problem of co-ordination and dynamic re-configuration of resources within a number of administrative domains. The granularity of resource reservations in terms of bandwidth and duration is important, together with the required Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. Because not all national research and education networks (NRENs) in Europe deploy the same type of technologies, there are different ways of providing dynamic circuits. AutoBAHN has been designed to support:

• Layer 2 switched circuits (Ethernet Private Line and Ethernet Virtual Private Line).
• Layer 1 switched circuits (STM-1 to optical wavelengths, 1 GE, 10 GE).

Typically, an end-point in NREN A needs to make a connection to an end-point in NREN B, via the GÉANT2 network. To provide guaranteed end-to-end service with resource reservation, service requests must be co-ordinated across domains. This role is undertaken by instances of the AutoBAHN system deployed in each involved domain.

Each network domain defines policies for the use of networking resources as well as quality parameters and is able to express them through AutoBAHN. Users authenticated by identity and role may receive authorisation against the respective policies. The originality of AutoBAHN lies in ensuring that new network services are introduced to meet the requirements of next-generation network users, overcoming the borders of physically and technically disjointed networks