Orchestrating intercontinental advance reservations with software-defined exchanges

Abstract

To interconnect research facilities across wide geographic areas, network operators deploy science networks, also referred to as research and education networks. These networks allow experimenters to establish dedicated circuits between research facilities for transferring large amounts of data by using advanced reservation systems. Intercontinental dedicated circuits typically require coordination among multiple administrative domains, which need to reach an agreement on a suitable advance reservation. The success rate of finding an advance reservation decreases as the number of participant domains increases for traditional systems because the circuit is composed over a single path. To improve provisioning of multidomain advance reservations, we have designed and implemented an architecture for end-to-end service orchestration in multidomain science networks that leverages software-defined exchanges for providing multipath, multidomain advance reservations. Our orchestration architecture improves the reservation success rate from 50% in single-path systems to 99% when four paths are available.