End-To-End (E2E) Provisioning
Today, individual e-science applications can generate network flows measured in Gbps, enduring hours, days or even weeks, often between a well-defined set of nodes, and with tight constraints on quality of service. The needs of such applications are best met by 'traffic engineered' point-to-point circuits, rather than 'best effort' routed networks. That is why the provisioning of end-to-end (E2E) lightpaths (i.e. Gigabit Ethernet circuits or even lambdas) is becoming very important in the service portfolios of national research and education networks (NRENs).
The NRENs backbone networks and the pan-European backbone network, GÉANT2, are ready to deliver some provisioning services, but technical and other factors often cause 'bottlenecks' at the level of metropolitan, campus and local infrastructures. In order to set up end-to-end connections, cooperation is necessary between NRENs, metropolitan, campus and local networks.
The workshop series targets NRENs, regional/metro, campus and local networking organisations to share expertise and experience in establishing real end-to-end services for universities and research labs in Europe.
This series of workshops, in short, is focusing on the following interest areas:
- Unified network architectures for end-to-end provisioning
- Simplicity of the provisioning processes and software tools
- Availability of resources, especially in the last mile
- Reliability of point-to-point circuits
- Implication of end-to-end connections on security (firewalling) aspects, routing integrity and IP addressing issues
- Operational issues: cooperation between netwrok engineers and application engineers
- Business models and cost analyses for end-to-end lightpaths
- Facilitating tutorials on the provisioning systems' implementation and usage by the campuses