Experimental evaluation of batch versus per-request service interconnection activation in PCE-based Grid networking

When dynamic service interconnection requests are managed by a centralized system (e.g., a network management system - NMS), the time required for the connections to be fully operational might be heavily impacted by the policy utilized to serve them. The policies must be devised for mitigating issues that increase this time, such as commercial router irresponsiveness to configuration commands during configuration commit. In this paper a batch provisioning policy is proposed to be implemented in a Grid-augmented NMS (GNMS) to serve grid computing clients interconnection requests and mitigate router irresposiveness. Based on the proposed policy, requests are queued in the GNMS and they are activated in a batch, based on a time-out. The proposed batch provisioning policy is experimentally compared to a per-request provisioning policy that serves the requests as soon as they are received by the GNMS. Experimental evaluation results show that, when connection requests are not rare, the average time elapsing between the reception of a connection request by the GNMS and the connection being fully operational (i.e., the service time) is much shorter, on average, if batch provisioning policy is utilized.