New FIBRE testbed

Programmable testbed networks can lower the barrier to entry for new ideas, increasing the rate of innovation in network infrastructure. Virtualisation of computers has long been used, and is today widely available on common platforms, and is accomplished by the sharing of processors and I/O devices using time slicing and virtual memory techniques. Virtualisation of networks is more recent, and is accomplished by the use of virtual routers and the multiplexing of links between them. A number of current techniques for network virtualisation are discussed in.

Programmable testbed networks call for programmable switches and routers that, using virtualisation, can process information flows for multiple isolated experimental networks simultaneously. It is envisaged that a researcher will be allocated a slice of resources across the whole network, consisting of a portion of network links, packet processing elements (e.g. routers) and end-hosts; researchers programme their slices to behave as they wish. A slice could extend across the backbone, into access networks, into college campuses, industrial research labs, and include wiring closets, wireless networks, and sensor networks, and may (or should) include real users of the applications it supports. Such a testbed facility may serve a widespread community of researchers and users.

The management of such a testbed facility is complex, and is automated by means of a control framework (CF), which allows centralised management of the entire facility, controlling access to the available virtualised computing and network resources, as well as providing support for measurement of resource consumption and, possibly, access to related functionalities, such as integrated emulation facilities. With the globalisation of experimental FI research, there has been considerable interest in the federation of distinct testbed facilities, in order to permit carrying out experiments that span multiple testbeds.

Five of the EU-side partners in this project are also participants in the FIRE testbed projects OneLab2 and OFELIA. As such, they already have deployed, or are engaged in deploying, large-scale testbed networks within Europe, in some cases involving international partners in North America and Japan. An important characteristic of OFELIA is its leveraging of the OpenFlow (OF) approach from Stanford. OF has three important roles in the OFELIA context. First it offers a flexible but standardized control interface to forwarding and processing hardware; second it is the basis for virtualising the network resources, and third it allows for easy and flexible addition of new functionalities on top of the control layer. The participation of OneLab2 partners will allow extensions of the OFELIA approach to new testbed environments and use cases not included in the OFELIA project, especially in the fields of wireless communications. In this latter area, considerable expertise in designing, building and evaluating large-scale testbed systems is brought to the project through the participation of National ICT Australia (NICTA), which has been a major contributor to the development of the OMF control framework. OMF is now a core GENI technology component, and is used for managing GENI’s WiMAX meso-scale deployment.

Brazilian partners bring to the project experience in participating in different FI testbed projects. One of these is the Project GIGA, managed by CPqD and RNP, which built and still operates a wide-area optical network testbed beginning in 2003, which was afterwards redirected to FI experimentation in 2009. A second relevant project is the INCT Web Science project, which effectively began in 2010, whose Future Internet Architectures subproject involves RNP and 4 university partners, with expertise in optical and wireless networks, simulation and emulation studies and network monitoring. The remaining university partners in the present proposal bring to the collaboration expertise in wireless communications and network software development. This project represents the first direct FI collaboration between the Brazilian and European partners, but both sides have already prior understandings and collaborations with international initiatives in other parts of the world.