A distributed signaling for the provisioning of on-demand VPN services in transport networks

Applications such as grid computing, storage or video-on-demand may need the provisioning by a transport network of ad-hoc secure end-to-end connections with guaranteed bandwidth, latency and resilience. The service plane (SP) is a functional layer, proposed by the authors, that enhances the automatically switched transport network (ASTN) for the provisioning of network services with a level of abstraction suitable for being invoked by applications. This paper details the distributed signaling running in the SP that implements the SP service abstraction and network resources virtualization capabilities. In particular, it focuses on the design of the signaling architecture among the centralized and distributed entities of the SP for the provisioning of on-demand Layer 3 (L3) virtual private network (VPN). A specific SP implementation is also presented and it is demonstrated by a testbed in which a video client application requests an L3 VPN in order to be connected with a video server across an MPLS-based transport network.