AutoBAHN Use Cases
The benefits of Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) services are most obvious where advanced requirements for network connectivity exist, especially when multiple domains are involved, capacity reservation needs to be supported in advance, and circuits must be realised and released in a dynamic manner. A number of use cases for AutoBAHN have already been demonstrated or are under development.
An interesting use case has been jointly demonstrated with the SCARIe project (the acronym stands for Software Correlator Architecture Research and Implementation for e-VLBI), which aims to develop a distributed software correlator that can be used for real-time electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI) in conjunction with advanced networking technologies. Funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), the project is a collaboration between the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE), the University of Amsterdam, and SARA Computing and Networking Services. AutoBAHN has provided dynamic circuits to carry pre-recorded telescope data distributed across Europe to the DAS-3 cluster in the University of Amsterdam for correlation
The reasons why dynamic circuit provisioning by AutoBAHN has presented an advanced solution for the SCARIe e-VLBI include the following:
- The worldwide VLBI network does not operate continuously, which means that the circuits are not needed permanently.
- The locations of the actual telescopes that participate in observations vary.
- In an advanced software-based correlator setup, the software can be run on many distributed clusters, with more demanding and dynamic needs for connectivity.
