First Working Prototypes of User Control of Lightpaths Demonstrated

OTTAWA, CANADA -- CANARIE announced that the world's first successful prototype demonstrations of user control of lightpath switch devices that are used on the CA*net 4 network. The research program to develop these prototypes was funded in part by CANARIE and Cisco Systems Canada.

Research teams from University of Ottawa, Communications Research Centre, Carleton University, University of Waterloo, Université du Québec à Montréal and Montague River participated in the research program to develop this new technology that fundamentally changes the current approach to the management and control of optical Internet networks. Previous architectural approaches to optical Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) required a network operator to maintain end to end state in the network using such technologies such as Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) or Automatic Switched Transport Networks (ASTN). With user controlled or Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) management of lightpaths the end user can now autonomously and independently create end-to-end optical VPNs across multiple independently managed networks where the state is maintained solely at the edge of the network. As well, end users can independently cross connect or add/drop these lightpaths anywhere in the network without permission or signalling a central administrator. They can also partition these lightpaths and re-advertise them to other users. It will also allow researchers or institutions to autonomously interconnect their optical VPNs or lightpaths to create discipline specific ad hoc networks for example in high energy physics, astronomy, bio-informatics, etc or to reduce general Internet costs by remote peering at no cost Internet peering exchanges.

The research teams employed a variety of emerging service oriented technologies to facilitate user control of lightpaths in a multi-management domain network including the Globus Toolkit implementation of the OGSI/OGSA specification, Sun MicroSystem's Jini/JavaSpaces paradigm for high availability distributed services, and loosely coupled multi-agent systems.

The primary application for this technology is for the new Lambda Grids such as TransLight being deployed around the world to support high end scientific research in high energy physics, astronomy, bio-informatics, etc. User controlled lightpaths allow these application to invoke spatial Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms where a separate optical BGP static route is setup directly between a destination host and client server operating in parallel with the normal hop by hop BGP route. The high-end data traffic required for these grid applications is then automatically re-routed over the static optical BGP path rather than the normally congested routed path. Setting up a separate direct BGP path allows for end to end QoS, the use of novel TCP protocols, super size MTUs, and other techniques to efficiently manage large data transfer.

Further research is planned to extend these novel concepts to LAN networks and to deploy these systems in support of real world applications in the coming months across CA*net 4 and other global lambda networks.

"We are very excited about the potential for this technology to support the needs of advanced science, health applications and distance education," said Andrew Bjerring, President and CEO of CANARIE.

"Optical networking is one of the key growth technologies that will drive the long-term success of the networking industry," said Lui Fogolini, vice-president, service provider operations at Cisco Systems Canada. "We are proud to team with CANARIE to stimulate 'made in Canada' innovations that have the potential to revolutionize networking around the world."

About CANARIE
CANARIE is Canada's advanced Internet organization, a not-for-profit corporation that facilitates the development and use of next-generation research networks and the applications and services that run on them. By promoting collaboration among key sectors and by partnering with similar initiatives around the world, CANARIE stimulates innovation and growth and helps to deliver social, cultural, and economic benefits to all Canadians. In 2002, the Government of Canada recognized CANARIE as one of the organizations leading innovation in Canada. CA*net 4, Canada's national research and innovation network, is developed and operated by CANARIE. CANARIE positions Canada as the global leader in advanced networking, and is supported by its members, project partners, and the Government of Canada.

About Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet.

About Cisco Systems Canada
Cisco Systems Canada Co. has offices across Canada dedicated to customer support, sales, and service. In addition, Cisco Systems has a significant research and development centre in Ottawa, Ontario.

About Communications Research Centre Team
(Michel Savoie, Scott Campbell, Hanxi Zhang, Jing Wu, Mathieu Lemay)
The Communications Research Centre (CRC), an Agency of Industry Canada, is a participant in this joint project with the University of Ottawa. It is a federal government research lab conducting R&D in advanced telecommunications. CRC's annual budget is in the order of $37M and its workforce consists of 409 employees (247 from the four research branches). The Broadband and Optical Networks (RBON) group headed by Mr. Savoie is part of the Broadband Network Technologies research branch. This group has expertise in the area of optical networks and broadband applications. The group is participating in the NCIT's Optical Networks and IP Traffic (ONIT) project lead by the University of Ottawa. It is collaborating on Optical BGP (OBGP) related projects with Carleton University and has initiated an All Optical Network (AON) Demonstrator program under which a testbed is being implemented to verify and validate architectures and control & management solutions for next-generation optical networks. Mr. Savoie is responsible for the Broadband Applications and Demonstration Laboratory (BADLABTM) and the Optical Networking Laboratory (ONL), two CRC facilities which are used to investigate and developed integrated communications systems comprising fibre-optics, satcom and radio. These facilities allow the demonstration and testing of new broadband applications, services and technologies through a variety of advanced telecommunications networks across Canada and the world.

About Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) Team
(Omar Cherkaoui, Thi Dieu Linh Truong, Khalid Ouyahya, Boubker Ghandour, Fabien Donato)
The UQAM Lightpath project aims at providing a system for the control of lightpaths on high-speed networks. The system allows users or Grid applications to dynamically establish and provision lightpaths across multiple independent Autonomous Systems (AS). The system incorporates a PolicyManager for managing the domain policies and for controlling the lightpath allocation in each AS. The PolicyManager allows specifying the rules for user access control, providing a flexible way to configure the lightpaths according to policy conditions. Each management domain has different strategies for the management and the allocation of their lightpaths which are represented by policies. Policies can also specify time conditions, enabling the user to reserve lightpaths at a certain time. Based on the user or application privilege level, on the lightpath availability and on the domain policies, the system can accept the reserved lightpath and automatically provision it. The project is realized by the OpticNet research group from the Teleinfo lab at the University of Quebec in Montreal. The Teleinfo research lab associated to the Computer Science department is lead by Professor Omar Cherkaoui and has more than 30 members including two professors as well as Ph.D., M.Sc. and internship students. The lab specializes in advanced aspects of high-speed network management and actively collaborates with Cisco, Canarie, Bell Canada, Hexagram, Nortel Networks and Telus. The OpticNet research group conducts research on several aspects of optical network such as Traffic Engineering and QoS.

About University of Waterloo Team
(Raouf Boutaba,Youssef Iraqi, Adel Ghlamallah , Basem Shihada, Wojciech Golab, Boris Jabes, Iban Touchet)
The University of Waterloo team proposes a Grid-centric approach to providing customer control of lightpaths, where high-level lightpath services are exposed using a standard Grid interface. These services allow users to partition lightpaths into pieces of smaller bandwidth, and to advertise such partitions for lease to other users. The pool of advertised resources can in turn be used to construct end-to-end lightpaths across multiple management domains via lightpath concatenation. Users can also specify policies concerning peering of their own lightpaths with those of other users. The system comprises a User Access Layer that presents a Web interface to human users and invokes lightpath services on their behalf, a Service Provisioning Layer that hosts the lightpath services in the form of Grid services, and a Resource Management Layer that enables shared ownership and control of hardware resources such as bandwidth and lightpath cross-connections.

About Montague River Networks Inc.
Montague River Networks Inc. is a Canadian startup whose primary technology is designed to support the virtualization of network based resources and deliver customer empowered control over the services that this infrastructure supports. Montague River's technology enables Grid Service Providers to support complex end to end services over Internet scale networks.

About University of Ottawa (U of O) Team
(Gregor V. Bochmann, Jun Chen, Ling Zou, Wei Zhang, Eric Zhang)
This team, which is part of the School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) at the University of Ottawa, has a joint project with the Communications Research Centre (CRC) for building a system for user-controlled lightpath provisioning (UCLP). This UCLP system is based on a distributed design which uses network management information stored at different sites within the context of a global network consisting of several automonous domains. This distributed design is implemented in Java and uses the Jini technology for advertizing and finding services and sites participating in the UCLP system, and JavaSpaces technology for storing the management information and providing distributed transaction management. A service access point (SAP) following the Grid standards is also available by which a user or application can obtain all the UCLP services provided by the system. A screen-oriented interface, realized as a Java Web Start application running in a browser, provides access to the UCLP system through this Grid SAP for users and administrators.

Contact:
Martin Sampson
CANARIE Manager, Communications
ph: +1.613.943.5377
martin.sampson @ canarie.ca