A policy-based approach for user controlled lightpath provisioning

There is a growing need for e2e lightpaths for high volume data transferring applications such as GridFTP and SAN. They wish to dynamically deploy lightpaths over multiple management domains. Research, sponsored by Canarie Incorporated, is underway to enable "customer-empowered networks" and to experiment them with the Canadian research network CA*Net4. New signaling and control approaches using Web services have been proposed. One difficulty is that each domain must retain the control of their optical network infrastructure and ensure proper allocation of optical resources. Hence, it is important that the signaling takes into account the management constraints imposed by the different domains. This paper presents a policy-based approach for user-controlled lightpath provisioning. The work builds on the research around the new signaling approaches for realizing customer-empowered networks. We present an architecture based on Web Services allowing users or Grid applications to establish e2e lightpaths over multiple autonomous systems. To tackle the problem of admission control and to address the resource allocation issue, we developed policy restricted signaling which allows customers to reserve lightpaths over multiple domains while ensuring that management rules of each domain are enforced. The signaling has been implemented and the experiment on a small network composed of Cisco equipment proves the viability of our approach.