Optical Networking

Introduction

The networking world is slowly approaching a point where the routing is more expensive than the transport of packets. At the same time there are applications in the science world which can benefit from high transport capacity between a very limited set of destinations. This high volume network traffic does not need expensive layer 3 services but can perfectly be handled by layer 2 and 1 technologies. In a few places in the world prototype optical exchange facilities are build to learn to provide these new application oriented services. Most notably this research is carried out at StarLight, CANARIE and NetherLight.

NetherLight, located in the SURFnet Point Of Presence at SARA on the Amsterdam Science Park, is an advanced optical infrastructure and proving ground for network services optimized for high-performance applications. Operational since summer 2001, NetherLight is currently a multiple GigE and SONET switching facility for high-performance access to participating networks and will ultimately become a pure lambda switching facility for wavelength circuits as optical technologies and their control planes mature. NetherLight's international connectivity includes dedicated lambda's to New York, to the StarLight facility in Chicago, CERN in Switzerland, to UKLight in London and CzechLight in Prague. Within the Netherlands, SURFnet connects to ASTRON / JIVE in Dwingeloo to NetherLight by means of a 32-wavelength DWDM transport network. Computer cluster facilities on the Science Park Amsterdam are connected to the NetherLight facility with 10 GigE since February 2003.

The NetherLight and StarLight facilities are being used by researchers from the University of Amsterdam in collaboration other partners, like the University of Illinois in Chicago, NorthWestern University and University of California at San Diego to investigate novel concepts of optical bandwidth provisioning and to gain experience in these new techniques. Particularly, researchers are investigating different scenarios on how lambda's can be used to provide tailored network performance for demanding grid applications. Important issues are: how to get traffic onto and out of lambda's; how to map load on the network to a map of lambda's; how to deal with lambda's at peering points; how to deal with provisioning when more administrative domains are involved; and, how to do fine-grain, near real-time grid application lambda provisioning.

In addition, our research aims to develop and support Authorization, Authentication and Accounting (AAA) services that can inter-operate across organizational boundaries, are extensible yet common across a wide variety of Internet services, enable a concept of an AAA transaction spanning many stakeholders, provide application-independent session management mechanisms, contain strong security mechanisms that be tuned to local policies, and are scalable to the size of the global Internet. This activity grew out of the work of the authorization team of the IETF AAA Working Group and is carried forward in the Global Grid Forum.

NetherLight is built and funded by SURFnet, the Dutch Research Network organization.

Publications

For a list of publications, see the home pages of Cees de Laat or Freek Dijkstra.

Useful info

• Detailed information on the current setup of the network (protected by the username/password air/air to prevent that this information is being harvested by spiders)
• Of course some historic highlights!
• An Optical news website: http://www.lightreading.com/
• An old, but still usefull page by Victor Reijs (former SURFnet employee, now at HEAnet) on fiber specs

News

Cees de Laat has been nominated for the Vosko Trofee 2005.