GEANT3

GÉANT is the pan-European data network dedicated to the research and education community. Together with Europe's national research networks, GÉANT connects 40 million users in over 8,000 institutions across 40 countries.

Collaboration with Europe's NRENs

The previous GÉANT project (GN2), which ended in early 2009, was focused on building the world's most advanced network of its type, using innovative technology to enable a range of networking services. With the infrastructure in place, the current GÉANT (Géant3) project is focused on developing and rolling out tools and services in collaboration with Europe's NRENs, aimed at better-serving the evolving needs of the research and education community into the long term.

Together with SURFnet, SARA is involved in the activity on multi-domain network services research, in the work packages regarding Hybrid Network Provisioning and Network Monitoring.

Hybrid Network Provisioning (2010)

The objective of the Hybrid Network Provisioning task (JRA2 T2) is to enhance a prototype for dynamic circuit provisioning over different technologies in a multi-domain environment (known as AutoBAHN). SARA's activities in this task includes:

• Contribution to specification for inclusion of accounting messages in the AutoBAHN framework. These messages can be used for usage reports, capacity management and billing.
• Contribution to last mile configuration issues and applications. For this task, SARA described it’s implementation of virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) on the router where the lightpaths terminate. This task ended April 2011.

Documents

S. Boele, P. de Boer, F. Dijkstra, I. Idziejczak, B. Kreukniet, R. van der Pol
Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) for Lightpaths - Implementations at SARA
Technical Paper, March 2011

Network Monitoring (2009-2012)

The objective the Network Monitoring task (JRA2 T3) is to investigate requirements and provide possible solutions for monitoring of cross-layer multi-domain network connections. It builds upon PerfSONAR, the multi-domain monitoring infrastructure developed in Geant2 project, in collaboration with Internet2.

SARA's activities in this task include:

• Enhancement of multi-domain monitoring infrastructure, improving the existing PerfSONAR monitoring system.
• Specification of cross-layer network monitoring.
• Enhancement and finalization of the standard for network measurement and control (in the NM and NMC working groups in the Open Grid Forum) for perfSONAR system.

Much of the improvements come from the standardization of the Network Markup Language (NML) in the Open Grid Forum.

Links

• GÉANT: www.geant.net
• Open Grid Forum