Elsevier

Computer Networks

Volume 52, Issue 10, 16 July 2008, Pages 2065-2076
Computer Networks

SIP-enabled Optical Burst Switching architectures and protocols for application-aware optical networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2008.02.016Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper presents a novel application-aware network architecture for emerging IT services and future Internet applications. It proposes and analyses network architectures that integrate Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) with Optical Burst Switched (OBS) network technology in a unified manner. It demonstrates that the proposed SIP-enabled OBS network can be used to manage application sessions and provide network and IT services according to the application requirements. Furthermore, various SIP over OBS layering architectures, utilizing a number of end-to-end resource discovery protocols (both for network and non-network (IT) resources) are presented and analyzed. Finally, this paper reports on the validation of functionalities, mechanisms and protocols for the proposed SIP-enabled OBS network, from the node level to the network level, through a test-bed demonstrator.

Introduction

In the future, Internet service providers will attempt to integrate and manage resources and services according to application requirements, and will do so within distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic environments. The realization of this goal requires breaking down the many barriers that normally separate application services, IT resources (computing systems), and the underlying network, in addition to the work involved in making the data network infrastructures application-aware. One of the key steps to realizing an application-aware network environment is to provide solutions that connect application layers and geographically distributed IT resources and services (e.g., supercomputers, data centers, IPTV) with emerging and promising optical transport network technologies (such as Optical Burst Switching (OBS)). OBS network transport technology [1] is a suitable candidate for implementing a scalable network infrastructure to address the needs of emerging IT networking services and future Internet applications [2], [3]. Its transport format can be ideally designed to a user’s bandwidth requirements, and it can provide efficient use of network resources. Furthermore, the optical bandwidth can be reserved for a specified time slot (i.e., only for the duration of the burst). Therefore it can maximize efficiency of the transport service (i.e., connectivity, bandwidth) in order to meet the demands of the user’s applications.

An application-aware optical network needs both an efficient network transport technology (such as OBS) and an application layer signaling protocol that can help users indicate their needs and that will also aid resource providers in making resources and services known and reachable to users. In this work, we have assumed that these actions may be supported by a session management protocol. The concept of a service session is well known in networking, in addition to its use in everyday life, and it refers to a set of activities performed by a user that can be logically grouped. In networks, several exchanges of information (either in parallel or in series, and sometimes referring to different media) may be part a single session. The session may be manipulated by the user or the network according to the user’s needs; for instance, a session may be suspended or retrieved, and so on. This paper assumes that the users’ requests for “communication services” can be mapped into “communication sessions” independently of the networking environment and the effective location of the service resources. In this piece, we show how session manipulation functions can be used to announce network and non-network resources with various degrees of pervasiveness, in addition to illustrating the ways that session management may be used to attach/detach resource to a specific communication service. To implement these concepts in the test-bed presented here, we have chosen the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) [4] since it is the most popular session manipulation protocol in the Internet. SIP is an agile protocol that works independently of underlying transport protocols and without dependency on the type of session that is being established. SIP does this by limiting itself to a modular philosophy and by focusing on a specific set of functions. In this way, it maximizes its interoperability with existing and future protocols and applications. Finally, SIP has been chosen as the signaling protocol for the IMS (Internet Multimedia Subsystem) [5] that promises to be the mobile pervasive network of the future, indicating that it is likely to be a long-lasting protocol.

SIP integration with OBS networks was initially introduced in [6]. Two SIP-enabled control plane architectures, the overlay and integrated, were proposed, and the first one was also implemented. In [7], the use of the SIP protocol to support Grid networking over an OBS network is introduced. Grid-aware SIP Proxy (GSP) is understood to be a network component that is able to satisfy the communication requests of Grid applications by exploiting the SIP protocol over the OBS network. Extensions to existing SIP protocols (PUBLISH, SUBSCRIBE, NOTIFY) were introduced to map Job Subscription Description Language (JSDL) [8] documents, which are used to describe the job requirements of individual communication sessions. SIP is thus proposed to give Grid middleware the capacity to exploit the network-oriented features on one side and the rich semantic of application oriented languages, such as JSDL, on the other. The above mentioned cases of the SIP-enabled OBS were limited to overlay architecture. In these cases, SIP messages were transported over the IP layer and the OBS control plane was used in the traditional way to reserve and establish network connectivity. In [9], the first experimental results of a partially-integrated architecture were demonstrated.

A number of OBS test-beds have been reported [10], [11] in the past, and an OBS-like signaling protocol, called Just-In-Time, was introduced in [12]. Just-In-Time enables optical networking for distributed and collaborative applications such as Grids. However, in this method, the application layer services (e.g., resource discovery, reservation, etc.) are deployed over the IP network, and OBS is used simply as a transport network. Here we extensively analyze, compare, and describe the deployment considerations of three architectural models: overlay, partially-integrated and fully-integrated. Finally, end-to-end SIP–OBS protocols are described in order to realize this solution. Three different approaches to publishing computational resources in a SIP–OBS network environment are introduced. These are: localized, distributed, and centralized. Each approach provides a different level of control to service providers in addition to a different level of scalability. Depending on the service level agreements (SLAs), a service provider can choose the most appropriate approach for its own domain. The level of scalability required must be considered when deciding among these approaches. Initial experiments with the SIP proxy level have been conducted to provide some scalability information regarding this approach. A complete description of SIP-enabled OBS edge and core routers has also been provided for possible deployment configurations. Overall, the enrichment of the OBS control plane with SIP messages was used to create sessions and connections in a single step. This enhancement was accomplished by encapsulating PUBLISH, SUBSCRIBE, NOTIFY, and INVITE messages into a burst control header (BCH) and transporting them over the OBS control plane. This way, the OBS network is aware of the requirements and status of the session and can create one-way connections to transport all data of that session over OBS accordingly. In this manner, one session associated with one or many OBS connections (burst transmissions) may be received. Coordination of network and IT services according to the application requirements was demonstrated by implementing the partially-integrated architecture.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines various SIP-enabled OBS network architectures that are proposed to support future IT services and applications. End-to-end SIP–OBS protocols have been proposed and reported in Section 3. Section 4 presents functionalities of SIP–OBS test-bed by providing description of both edge and core SIP-enabled OBS routers. Section 5 reports the experimental description and results and Section 6 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

SIP-enabled OBS network architectures

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) application layer protocol used for establishing sessions in an IP network. SIP has been developed purely as a mechanism to establish sessions; it does not know about the details of a session. SIP simply initiates, terminates and modifies sessions. In other words, SIP does not provide services. Rather, SIP provides primitives that can be used to implement different services. For example, SIP can locate a user and

End-to-end SIP–OBS protocols

All aforementioned SIP over OBS network architectures can deploy protocols in a number of distinct ways. Implementation scenarios of resource advertisement and discovery protocols to support IT services (Fig. 4a–c) as well as reservation protocols (Fig. 4d and e) and are described below. The protocols represent capability and availability (PUBLISH), discovery and reservation of IT and network resources. The IT resources that are published, and in turn discovered and reserved, incorporate CPU,

SIP-enabled OBS test-bed: network and nodes functionalities

We developed a test-bed to validate the functionality of the proposed SIP enabled OBS network architecture, as well as to test the proposed networking scenarios The test-bed architecture is based on OBS network technology utilizing SIP-enabled OBS routers and JIT–SIP signaling protocol as shown in Fig. 5.

The test-bed comprises two SIP-enabled edge routers, one SIP-enabled core router and the JIT–SIP control protocol, as described below. The SIP-enabled edge OBS router uses a PowerPC processor

Experimental description and demonstration results

The partially-integrated SIP–OBS model, demonstrated in the test-bed, provides application layer resource discovery and routing of the application data (or users’ jobs) to the appropriate resources across the optical network. The SIP-based control plane architecture comprises a resource discovery stage and a traditional OBS signalling stage using the Just-In-Time (JIT) bandwidth reservation scheme. The user who has data that will be processed remotely (e.g., Grid user, e-Science) sends a

Summary

We have presented a novel SIP-enabled OBS network architecture supporting Internet applications for future use. Key architectural issues, sub-systems, protocols and techniques for a complete application-aware OBS network were investigated. In particular, we explored an application-aware edge OBS router, an application-aware core OBS router and JIT–SIP based control and signaling mechanism that can perform network and IT resource discovery, scheduling, reservation and management. Based on these

Acknowledgement

This work has been supported by European Commission through the IST e-Photon/One+ project.

Georgios Zervas was awarded the M.Eng. degree of Electronic and Telecommunication Systems Engineering with distinction from the University of Essex (UK) in 2003. He is currently working towards his Ph.D. degree in Optical Networks and End-Systems for Grid Application and Services at the University of Essex. He is working as a Senior Research Officer in the EC funded project titled Lambda User Controlled Infrastructure for European Research (Phosphorus). He is also involved in EC funded IST

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Georgios Zervas was awarded the M.Eng. degree of Electronic and Telecommunication Systems Engineering with distinction from the University of Essex (UK) in 2003. He is currently working towards his Ph.D. degree in Optical Networks and End-Systems for Grid Application and Services at the University of Essex. He is working as a Senior Research Officer in the EC funded project titled Lambda User Controlled Infrastructure for European Research (Phosphorus). He is also involved in EC funded IST e-Photon/ONe+ project and a number of research activities within the University of Essex. His research interests include high-speed optoelectronic router design, Optical Burst Switched networks, GMPLS networks, user network interface and Grid Networks.

Yixuan Qin received his M.Sc. degree in computer and information networks from the University of Essex, Colchester, UK, in 2003, where he is currently working towards his Ph.D. degree. In addition, he is a Research Officer in the Photonic Networks Lab. His research interests include high-speed digital system design, flexible networks, passive optical network and optical burst switching.

Reza Nejabati has over 10 years academic and industrial experience in the field of high-speed network switches and programmable router design. He received his M.Sc. degree in 2002 and Ph.D. degree in 2007 in the field of optical telecommunication and networking from University of Essex, Colchester, UK. He is currently a Research Academic Fellow in the Photonic Network Research Group at the Essex University. The main current areas of his interest are design and control issues for high-speed electronic and optoelectronic interfaces in photonic packet-based networks as well as architectural considerations for photonic Grid networks.

Dimitra Simeonidou is currently a professor at the University of Essex. She has over 10 years experience in the field of optical transmission and optical networks. In 1987 and 1989 she received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the Physics Department of the Aristotle University of Thessalonica, Greece and in 1994 a Ph.D. degree from the University of Essex. From 1992 to 1994 she was employed as a Senior Research Officer at University of Essex in association with the MWTN RACE project. In 1994 she joined Alcatel Submarine Networks as a Principle Engineer and contributed to the introduction of WDM technologies in submerged photonic networks. She participated in standardization committees and was an advising member of the Alcatel Submarine networks patent committee. She is the author of over 70 papers and the holds 18 patents relating to photonic technologies and networks. Her main research interests include optical wavelength and packet switched networks, network control and management and GRID networking.

Franco Callegati is currently serving as associate professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. He received his Master’s and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1989 and 1992 from the University of Bologna, Italy. He was a research scientist at the Teletraffic Research Centre of the University of Adelaide, Australia, at Fondazione U. Bordoni, Italy and at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests are in the field of teletraffic modeling and performance evaluation of telecommunication networks. He has been working in the field of all optical networking since 1994 with particular reference to network architectures and performance evaluation for optical burst and packet switching. He participated in several research project on optical networking at the national and international level, such as ACTS KEOPS, IST DAVID and IST E-photon/ONe, often coordinating workpackages and research activities.

Aldo Campi received his degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy in 2004. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Bologna. His research interests include optical burst and packet network, scheduling algorithms and multimedia architectures realized with SIP protocol.

Walter Cerroni graduated from the University of Bologna, Italy, in Telecommunications Engineering, in 1999 and received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the same university in 2003. During 1999 he was a visiting researcher at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he collaborated with the Alcatel Corporate Research Center in Richardson, TX, USA. From 2003 to 2005, he has been working as a Research Associate at the Italian National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT). Since 2005 he has been Assistant Professor of Communication Networks at the Department of Electronics, Computer Sciences and Systems (DEIS) of the University of Bologna, School of Engineering, Cesena Campus, Italy. His current research interests include performance evaluation of optical packet/burst-switched networks, focusing in particular on contention resolution mechanisms, and signalling protocols for grid services over dynamic optical networks. He collaborates to the IST e-Photon/ONe+ and BONE European Networks of Excellence. He is also involved in Italian national projects on optical networking.

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