OSCARS Provides On-Demand Circuit Provisioning Service

ESnet is developing and deploying a prototype service that enables on-demand provisioning of guaranteed bandwidth, secure virtual circuits within the ESnet production network. The service, called OSCARS (ESnet On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System), is designed specifically to meet the science discipline-driven network requirement of dynamically provisioned quality of service (QoS) paths, as laid out in two DOE Office of Science workshops in the past two years.

The new service is being developed in close cooperation with Internet2/Abilene and the U.S. research and education network community, and with Dante/GEANT and the European research and education network community. The collaboration ensures that the new network services will interoperate among DOE labs and universities and other research institutions. Other collaborators include Brookhaven National Lab (Terapaths: A QoS-Enabled Collaborative Data Sharing Infrastructure for Peta-Scale Computing Research), General Atomics (network QoS for magnetic fusion) and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Internet end-to-end performance monitoring).

As a result of a Birds-of-a-Feather discussion at Internet2's Joint Tech meeting last year, ESnet and Internet2 have been co-developing the code base for the reservation system. Both ESnet and Internet2 have deployed a working prototype of the circuit-based service since early spring of 2005.

In an effort to promote inter-domain interoperability, ESnet, Internet and GEANT are in discussions on defining a common service definitions document. Work is also being done on workflow schemes to facilitate inter-domain reservation requests.