CORONET: Testbeds, demonstration, and lessons learned [Invited]

Abstract

The DARPA Core Optical Networks (CORONET) program envisions a highly dynamic network environment requiring fast provisioning and restoration for a wide variety of bandwidth-on-demand services in IP-over-optical networks. This paper builds on previously reported work on the development of fast provisioning and restoration protocols to meet CORONET requirements. Two separate CORONET testbed implementations are described: an emulation testbed and a cloud application testbed. The emulation testbed is a software implementation of a 100-node, global scale control plane network designed to investigate and validate the performance of CORONET provisioning and restoration protocols for the transport layer. The cloud application testbed is implemented on a four-node network in AT&T's Software Defined Network (SDN) Wide Area Network (SWAN) testbed and is designed to show the utility of CORONET fast provisioning for cloud computing applications. In particular, we demonstrate dynamic provisioning of inter-datacenter capacity for virtual machine load balancing under the control of an SDN orchestrator. "Lessons learned" and further challenges are summarized.