Advance and Immediate Reservations of Virtualized Network Resources

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1 Advance and Immediate Reservations of Virtualized Network Resources Laia Ferrao, Xavier Barrera, Eduard Grasa, Sergi Figuerola Fundació i2cat, Gran Capità 2 4 Edifici Nexus I 2ª planta, despatx 203, Barcelona, Spain {laia.ferrao, xavier.barrera, eduard.grasa, Keywords Advance Reservation, Virtual Network Resources, Argia, Chronos, HPDMnet Abstract The High Performance Digital Media Network (HPDMnet) is an international networking research testbed initiative that is developing the world s first international high performance service for high quality, large scale digital media that is required by bandwidth intensive applications. The network resources of the HDPMnet testbed are provisioned by Argia system and Chronos services. Argia is a network virtualization and control tool that enables multiple users to share a common physical optical network substrate and create their own isolated network on top of it. Chronos is an advance reservation system that interacts with Argia s resources. It allows users to reserve network resources in advance and handles routing so there is no need to know the inner topology. During the SC08, an HPDMnet demo was performed which demonstrated the usefulness of Argia and Chronos applied to media scenarios. Introduction During the last years there has been a trend for organizations such as universities, hospitals, schools and big corporations to buy their own fibre and point to point links from different suppliers. These organizations would like to manage these resources as part of their own network domain, and, at the same time, offer some services to their end users. Another new phenomenon is that many large remote sensor and instrumentation related projects are appearing that generate large data flows that need to be delivered to computing centres that can be far away. Consequently, an emerging new type of users is appearing that want to remotely control these instruments and modify the topology of the network connecting these data sources and sinks from time to time. Argia [1] is a middleware that was created to satisfy all these needs, it allows end users to treat network resources as software objects and provision and re configure lightpaths within a single domain or across multiple, independently managed domains. Chronos is a reservation system that allows users to perform advance and immediate reservations [2] of the networks resources without the need of knowing the inner topology. As a result, service providers can manage more efficiently their network resources and thus provide a better QoS. Chronos provides ARGIA with the capability of making these types of reservations; what is more, domains controlled by Chronos can be plugged into the Harmony system [3], a software developed inside the EU IST Phosphorus Project that is able to create multi domain reservations through different domains controlled by ARGIA Chronos, DRAC [4] and ARGON [5]. HPDMnet [6] is a network research initiative that is designing, developing, and implementing the world s first international high performance service for high quality, large scale digital media that is required by bandwidth intensive applications. HPDMnet is related to a set of activities, including the management of an international testbed, which is dynamically

2 provisioned by Argia and Chronos. The work carried out by the members of the HPDMnet was presented in the SC The High Performance Digital Media Network An international consortium of research centers has formed a cooperative partnership to address key challenges and opportunities related to using dynamically provisioned lightpaths for High Performance Digital Media (HPDM). Nowadays, multiple sites require High Performance/High Volume/High Definition digital media streaming simultaneously among all locations (Multi Point to Multi Point). Traditional L3 techniques cannot be used for many types of High Definition Media and were designed for many small information flows. For this reason this consortium is designing and developing new L1/L2 capabilities that can provide large scale HPDM services. The HPDM initiative is designing and developing a GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility) [7] service, instantiated at GOLEs that will be usable by any large scale digital media application, or other data intensive application. The service can be customized for a wide range of specialized applications. Digital Media can include visualization, animation, simulation, video, imaging, and other modalities and can be of any size or type. HPDMnet is related to a set of activities, including basic research and development, design and analysis of investigative experiments, the management of an international testbed, provision of prototype services, demonstrations at public national and international venues, and publication of information about activities. The HPDMnet research testbed has multiple sites within the GLIF infrastructure in North America and Europe. The network is dynamically provisioned by Argia and Chronos. 2. Argia: a tool to provide optical network resources as IaaS Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the IaaS Framework Virtualization is a current hot topic; a lot of research in virtualization related projects is being performed. This technique has been widely applied to PCs; tools like VMWare, Xen or others provide several virtual machines on the same hardware. PC Virtualization, which was originally used locally as a means to reduce data centers cost by maximizing the server usage, has been extended by companies like Amazon or BlueLock that are among the firsts to offer a new type of services called Infrastructure as a Service (or IaaS), by renting hardware using proprietary solutions. IaaS is the equivalent of Software as a Service (SaaS) for hardware devices, where users do not buy hardware but instead pay for the use of it to a third party (which is the real hardware owner). During the duration of the service, the user owns and controls the infrastructure as if he was the owner; this business model is targeted towards long term resource usage compared to on demand services. The IaaS Framework [8] is a generalized approach to the outcome of years of research under the UCLP [9] research programs funded by CANARIE. Beginning in 2001, two UCLP research projects were put in place to provide a virtualization solution for optical networks: UCLP initial goal was to provide end to end paths across domains; UCLPv2 [10], [11] goals were to create reusable and configurable network blocks. UCLPv2 concepts have evolved into many different Physical to Virtual (P2V) products and research projects that are built on the IaaS Framework: Argia is the product for optical networks (TDM, WDM and Fiber technology), Ether will be the product for Ethernet and MPLS networks, MANTICORE [12] is the research project for logical IP

3 networks and, finally, the GRIM project performs research on applying virtualization to instruments and sensors. The IaaS Framework is a set of resources, libraries and tools licensed under the Apache Software License version 2 that enable developers to quickly create new infrastructure as a service solutions based on the Framework programming model. The functionalities provided by these tools allow a developer to choose which web service stack will be used to expose the physical infrastructure as a service (supported SOAP engines include Axis2, CXF and Spring WS), and provide a series of modules to plug in capabilities like security, reservation management and data persistence to the infrastructure service. The Framework also provides libraries to speed up the development of drivers to communicate with the physical devices, like protocol parsers (TL1, NetConf, CLI), transport handlers (TCP, SSL, SSH, Telnet) and a driver architecture called the IaaS Engine. The current version of the IaaS Framework is evolving towards a new architecture. This current version is based on the Globus Toolkit 4 as a base technology. However, although it provides a lot of functionalities and WSRF, WS N and WS Security implementations, its programming model is too tightly coupled with WSRF, so it is impossible to separate the business logic from the web service code. This is a big issue since it prevents the developers from exposing hardware resources using different remote technologies (like plain HTTP, REST Style web service or others) and business logic is polluted with WSRF variables and statements. Therefore, these are the reasons why the IaaS Framework is being enhanced with a new internal core architecture, and no longer using the Globus Toolkit; instead, a new technology stack based on OSGi (a Java standard and runtime for creating and deploying service oriented bundle based Java applications), the Spring Framework (a Java Framework to create enterprise applications) and Apache Muse (a lightweight implementation of the WSRF, WSN and WSDM standards). Argia: IaaS for Optical Networks Argia is the IaaS Framework based system to create infrastructure as a service solutions for optical networks. Argia is the evolution of the UCLPv2 software; it is an ongoing effort towards creating a commercial product that can be deployed in production optical networks. Table 1 shows the network elements supported by the current release of Argia (Argia 1.4). This Argia release is built on the interim release of the IaaS Framework, still based on the Globus Toolkit 4. The next version of Argia, Argia 2.0, will be built on the first public version of the IaaS Framework. Table 2 illustrates the networks and testbeds where Argia 1.4 is currently deployed, and what is being used for. Vendor Model Technology Cisco ONS SONET and SDH Nortel OME 6500 SONET and SDH Nortel HDXc SONET and SDH Nortel OPTera Metro 5200 DWDM OADM Calient FiberConnect PXC Photonic Cross Connect (PXC) W onesys Proteus DWDM ROADM Cisco Catalyst 3750 (basic support) Emulating a PXC Table 1. Network elements supported by Argia 1.4

4 Network or testbed CANARIE network STARlight (GLIF GOLE) PacificWAVE (GLIF GOLE) KRlight (GLIF GOLE) CRC Network i2cat Network University of Essex testbed Poznan Supercomputing Center DREAMS Project testbed What is being used for Beta testing for use in production network HPDMnet research project HPDMnet research project HPDMnet research project PHOSPHORUS research project HPDMnet research project PHOSPHORUS research project PHOSPHORUS research project PHOSPHORUS research project PHOSPHORUS research project DREAMS research project Table 2. Current status of Argia deployment The main goal of Argia is to enable infrastructure providers to partition their physical networks/infrastructure and to give the control of the partitioned infrastructure to third parties (infrastructure integrators or APN administrators) during a period of time. These third parties may use the partitioned infrastructure in house, or may deploy some intelligent software on top of the resources (like Chronos, the resource reservation service) to provide services for their end users or they may even further partition the infrastructure and rent it to other users. Figure 1 shows a physical infrastructure (grey pipes represent links and blue circles represent nodes) partitioned into multiple parallel networks, also called APNs, (in different colors) which are provide as IaaS to third parties and controlled by them. Figure 1. Virtualized resources of a physical network

5 3. Chronos: a service to create circuit reservations Chronos is a reservation system that allows users to reserve network resources in advance or immediately if they are available at the time requested. It handles routing so it is not necessary to know the inner topology, users just select the endpoints to connect, the start and end times and the bandwidth needed and Chronos finds the correct path and reserve the resources for that time. The users of Chronos can be a human person, grid middleware (i.e. Harmony Project) or other type of network aware applications. In general, two types of resource reservations in networks can be distinguished: immediate reservations, which are made in a just in time manner, and advance reservations, which allow reserving resources a period of time before they are actually used. Advance reservations are a useful network service that can not only provide guaranteed connectivity for network users, but also allow service providers to more efficiently manage network resources and thus provide a better quality of service. Advance reservations are useful in any application where large amounts of data have to be transmitted over a network and the time of the transmission is known in advance. An advance reservation can be fixed or malleable: in fixed reservations the starting time and the duration are fixed, whereas in malleable reservations, both starting time and duration are variable. To allocate the resources that will create the optimal path through the network, routing strategies are based on Dijkstra s Shortest Path (DSP) algorithm. Chronos also offers the possibility to group several independent reservations into a single job. This feature basically allows for a higher convenience when the Chronos users plan complex workflows. While the workflow is not yet completely planned, these workflow items are blocked as pre reservations. Therefore, if the complete workflow was successfully planned, these pre reservations can be modified to permanent. Chronos offers the possibility to create Draft Reservations. These reservations can be used as templates, since not all the parameters must be specified in its creation. Figure 2 depicts the interaction between Chronos and Argia: the end users interact with the Chronos system to create the reservations, and Chronos calls Argia to activate and delete the physical connections. End users Human user Grid Middleware Web Client CHRONOS Advance Reservation Service ARGIA Figure 2. Interaction between Chronos and Argia

6 4. HPDMnet demo in the SC08 event The main goal of the demo in the SC08 was to create a L1/L2 network instantiation (the HPDMnet network) composed by resources from different physical networks, and then create end to end reservations between the different end sites attached to the network to be able to stream video in HD. The HPDMnet network instantiation used for the SC08 demonstration integrated resources from four different physical networks: the Pacific Wave GOLE, the STARlight GOLE, CANARIE and a testbed of Nortel Networks at Ottawa. Argia was used to create the network by means of leasing the different parts of the physical networks of each domain involved in the demo and Chronos was used to create reservations of the available resources. The process to create the HPDMnet network is explained in the following paragraphs in detail. First of all, to create the network used in the demo, the administrators of each physical network discovered the physical network of their respective domains using Argia s Resource Management Center (RMC), selecting the desired resources to include them in the final network. Figure 3 shows the results of this process. Nortel included one switch OME 6500, Pacific Wave included one switch Nortel HDXC, StarLight included two switches (one Nortel OME 6500 and one Nortel HDXC) and CANARIE included three switches Nortel OME Figure 3. Physical networks of each domain The next step was for each physical network to select the resources to be given away to the HPDMnet consortium (and that the HPDMnet consortium would use to create its own network). The resources selected by each physical network can be seen in Figure 4.

7 Figure 4. Resources allocated to HPDMnet by each physical network Then, the resources from the different independent domains were imported by the network administrator of the HPDMnet consortium at icair, and were used to create the HPDMnet network used for HD video streaming, as it can be seen in Figure 5. Figure 5. Exported Virtualized Resources at icair Finally, the administrator at icair created the topology of the HPDMnet network: links were drawn between the edge interfaces of each domain as shown in Figure 6. These drawings represent static links that were manually created between the interfaces of the different network elements (and that therefore are not under Argia s control).

8 Figure 6. HPDMnet network controlled by Argia Once the network was in place, users of the HPDMnet could start creating connections, reserving resources via Chronos, partitioning or bonding resources, etc., all without having to contact the network administrators of each domain. To expand the testbed of the HPDMnet consortium, resources can be integrated from other network providers using the same process explained above. In SC08, three demonstrations of the HPDMnet were performed; the first one used Chronos to create some reservations from each one of the different sites attached to the testbed (the Communications Research Centre, icair, the Fundació i2cat, SARA, UvA, and Nortel Networks Ottawa) to the demo venue located at Austin, Texas. The reservations were created specifying a relative start time between them (five minutes between the deletion of the previous reservation and the activation of the following one). To proof that the connections were correctly established and cancelled, video streaming in HD was used. The scenario of the demo is shown in Figure 7. Figure 7. Scenario of the demo in SC08

9 5. Conclusions and Future Work This paper has described the current state of the art and the demonstrations of the HPDMnet consortium that took place in the SC08 and proved the usefulness of Argia and Chronos. Using Argia, multiple users can share a common physical optical network substrate and create their own isolated network on top of it by means of the virtualization of the network resources. With the Chronos system, advance and immediate reservations of the virtualized network resources can be performed, without knowing the inner topology of the network; consequently, users can know in advance if the resources they will need to establish some connections will be available. The HPDMnet testbed is being extended to Asia. At present, there is no commercial version of Argia software yet, but it is under active developement. Argia will be useful in networks used in research, universities, local administration, health, etc., since it allows users to plan more efficiently the use of the resources and consequently, it will offer them the required QoS. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Michel Savoie, Scott Campbell, Hanxi Zhang and Bobby Ho from the Communications Research Centre (Canada), Mathieu Lemay from Inocybe Technologies Inc. (Canada), Hervé Guy from CANARIE, Joe Membretti and Jim Chen from icair, and all the other members of the HPDMnet consortium. References 1. Inocybe Technologies Inc. website: 2. Jun Zheng, Baoxian Zhang, Hussein T. Mouftah, Toward Automated Provisioning of Advance Reservation Service in Next Generation Optical Internet, IEEE COMMUNICATIONS MAGAZINE, December A. Willner, C. Barz, S. Figuerola, J.A. García Espín, J. Ferrer, and P. Martini, Harmony Advanced reservations in Heterogeneous, Multi domain environments, in Proceedings of the IFIP TC6 Networking '09, Springer Ed. (2009) 4. DRAC: optical/collateral/nn pdf 5. P. Martini, C. Barz, U. Bornhauser, M. Pilz, C. de Waal, and A. Willner, ARGON: Reservation in Grid enabled Networks, in Proceedings of the 1st DFN Forum on Communication Technologies, (2008) 6. HPDMnet website: 7. GLIF: hpdmnet.pdf 8. The IaaS Framework website. [Online]. Available at: 9. J. Wu, M. Savoie, S. Campbell, H. Zhang, and B. St. Arnaud, "Layer 1 Virtual Private Network Management by Users", IEEE Communications Magazine, Feature Topic on Advances in Control and Management of Connection Oriented Networks, pp , December E. Grasa, S. Figuerola, A. López, G. Junyent, M. Savoie, UCLPv2, a Network Virtualization Framework built on Web Services, IEEE Communications Magazine, Feature Topic on Web Services in Telecommunications part II, pp E. Grasa, S. Figuerola, A. López, G. Junyent, M. Savoie, B. St. Arnaud, M. Lemay, Articulated Private Networks in UCLP, TERENA Networking Conference, May 2007 [Online]. Available: E.Grasa, X. Hesselbach, S. Figuerola, V. Reijs, D. Wilson, J. M. Uzé, L. Fischer, T. de Miguel, The MANTICORE Project: Providing users with a Logical IP Network Service,

10 TERENA Networking Conference, May 2008 [Online]. Available: Vitae Laia Ferrao: Graduated in Computer Science Engineering of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC, December 2007). In February 2007 she joined the i2cat Foundation, where she did her master thesis on Chronos. At the moment she is still a member of the i2cat Foundation and collaborates with the Argia, Chronos and HPDMnet projects. Xavier Barrera: Graduated in Telecommunication Engineering of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC, May 2007). In December 2007 he joined the i2cat Foundation to collaborate with the Dreams and Argia projects. Eduard Grasa: is a Graduate in Telecommunication Engineering of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC, July 2004) and Ph.D. (UPC, February 2009). In 2003 he joined the Optical Communications Group (GCO), where he did his thesis on software architectures for the management and control of sliceable networks. During his thesis elaboration he collaborated with the Network Technologies Cluster of the i2cat Foundation, which he joined in September He has participated in several national and international research projects, including UCLPv1, UCLPv2, HULP, FP6 PHOSPHORUS, FP7 FEDERICA, DREAMS, HPDMnet, IaaS Framework, Argia and MANTICORE. Sergi Figuerola: Coordinator of the Network Technologies Cluster of the i2cat Foundation since A graduate in Telecommunication Engineering of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC, January 2002), he holds a Masters in Project Management from La Salle (Universitat Ramón Llull 2004). He joined the UPC's Optical Communications Group (GCO) in November He is a PhD candidate of the Signal Theory and Communications Department, awarded with a PhDs fellowship by the Spanish Science and Education Ministry in He is currently acting as Work Package leader of the PHOSPHORUS project (EC FP6) and Activity leader of the FEDERICA project (EC FP7).